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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