National Library of Australia
National Library of Australia 2003 Annual Report National Library of Australia 2003 Annual Report
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CORPORATE OVERVIEW

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Contents
Director General's Review
Corporate Overview
Report on Operations
Financial Statements
Appendices

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ISSUES

The Directions statement determines the Library’s broad technology priorities. In particular, technology has been used ‘to provide rapid and easy access to the wealth of information resources that reside in libraries and other cultural institutions’.

In June 2003 the Council approved an Information Technology Plan for the period July 2003 to June 2006. This plan identifies more than 50 projects to be undertaken over the three-year period, and provides indicative costs for these projects.

The plan indicates that the Library will place greater emphasis on the infrastructure required to manage its federated metadata repositories and services such as MusicAustralia and the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts (RAAM). This shift is also being driven by the need to ensure a robust solution for the Kinetica service after December 2005.

The Library aims to contain the costs of its information technology by a number of means, including competitive procurement procedures, continuous improvement, benchmarking of specific activities, and use of open source software where appropriate. During the year the Library completed a project to benchmark the costs of the desktop environment. The project confirmed that the Library’s desktop support services are broadly cost effective and identified some areas for efficiency improvement. Depending on the results of further benchmarking projects, the Library will consider the need to market test selected segments of its information technology infrastructure.

The Library’s website

In recent years the delivery of the Library’s services has been transformed by the maturing of the World Wide Web as a universal mechanism for information delivery. The Library’s website allows users to gain information about the Library’s collections, to browse or view portions of these collections, to see online exhibitions and to gain a good understanding of the Library’s strategies and activities. In the past year the Library has undertaken a major project to streamline the mechanisms through which users discover and obtain information on its website. A restructured website will be implemented in late 2003.

In accordance with government requirements, the Library has an Online Action Plan, a Privacy Statement, an Accessibility Statement and a metadata strategy pertaining to its website.

Digital services architecture

During the past four years the Library has defined and implemented a digital services architecture which supports the discovery, identification, management, storage and delivery of the Library’s digital collections. This architecture is now largely in place, although work still needs to be done on the management and delivery of audio collections, and on the management of rights and preservation information.

During the past year the Library:

  • acquired the TeraText Database System developed by InQuirion Pty Ltd to support the resource discovery component of the architecture. This change from another product was made in order to meet the Library’s needs for online performance in searching large metadata sets. Migration of PictureAustralia and the Pictures Catalogue has demonstrated that the new platform can provide a high degree of scalability and performance.
  • extended the capacity of the Digital Object Storage System. By the end of the year over five terabytes of digital collection material (including the PANDORA archive and digitised pictures, sheet music, maps, manuscripts and oral history audio files) were being stored in the system.
  • completed a new release of the Digital Archiving System (Version 2), improving workflow efficiencies for the staff who acquire and manage electronic collections
  • completed two upgrades of the Digital Collections Manager System (which supports the digitisation of pictures, maps, manuscripts and sheet music)
  • implemented online delivery systems for digitised sheet music and maps, and is currently redeveloping the manuscripts delivery system. These delivery systems are based on data stored in the Digital Collections Manager. The Library also investigated the web delivery of audio material from the oral history and music collections, and selected two streaming media technologies for use in future delivery services.

IT infrastructure improvements

The Library improved the performance and security of its information technology infrastructure by:

  • upgrading the desktop computers used in the reading rooms
  • improving the bandwidth of the local area network by replacing the switches and recabling the computer room
  • replacing the firewall product, in order to improve the reliability and security of the local area network.

Service availability

The average availability during the year of 10 key service areas was as follows:

CHART - Services

Availability exceeded the Library’s target of 99.5 per cent for eight of these 10 key service areas. The Integrated Library Management System did not meet the target due to the failure of one of its catalogue interfaces to respond to requests during one weekend in October. PANDORA did not meet the target largely due to a hardware failure in December that led to 46 hours downtime.

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