National Library of Australia
National Library of Australia 2003 Annual Report National Library of Australia 2003 Annual Report
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NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA IN 2002-03

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

DIRECTOR-GENERAL'S REVIEW

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS TO ACCESSING INFORMATION

The Library has developed a number of new services designed to enhance access to information by Australians, regardless of their location:

  • The provision of copies of items from the Library’s collections is an important service for people outside Canberra, especially for people who cannot easily visit a large research library. Copies Direct is a new ‘one-stop-shop’ service that allows users to request copies of collection items.
  • Web-based services offered by the Library have been expanded to offer faster and more comprehensive access to electronic information resources. For example, the Library has implemented a new technical infrastructure to enhance PictureAustralia. This web-based service started over two years ago, enabling a single search across the digitised picture collections of a number of Australian cultural organisations. Public response has been enthusiastic. The service has been emulated in Canada and several other countries are looking to implement similar services. This is the first web-based service to include such a wide participation across the cultural sector—participating organisations include libraries, archives, museums, galleries, educational institutions and local history organisations.
  • The Library has continued to develop an architecture for the management, discovery and use of its digital collections. A series of delivery systems has been developed for digitised images of pictures, sheet music, maps and manuscripts with facilities for page turning and zooming to view images in detail, among other navigational aids.
  • The Library’s digitisation program improves national access to our collections. This year the Library collaborated with the university sector on two significant digitisation projects. We commenced digitising some of the papers in our Alfred Deakin manuscript collection to support Deakin University’s Alfred Deakin Prime Ministerial Library. A number of historical works, including Tapa cloth specimens collected on Captain James Cook’s voyages, were also digitised as part of the Library’s contribution to the South Seas Project, funded by an Australian Research Council grant and being undertaken jointly by the Library and the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at The Australian National University. This project is investigating the opportunities provided by digital publishing for online access to scholarly research. Other digitisation projects completed this year include the Frank Hurley collection of photographic negatives and photographs from the Australian Inland Mission.
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