Libraries Australia on the road

In April, the Customer Services team, with assistance from the Database Services team, commenced a national roadshow tour. Designed to be interactive, libraries using Libraries Australia are able to ask questions about any aspect of the services. New workflow options are presented. This photograph shows the roadshow in Rockhampton in May. Since then, the Libraries Australia team has visited the Northern Territory (16-17 June) and Tasmania (23 June). More roadshows will be held in South Australia, Western Australia, and other states in the next two months.

Citations in Libraries Australia using COinS and Zotero

Does your community need to cite published research in a standard way? Libraries Australia has recently implemented the COinS standard. It supports Zotero, the research tool which allows citations to be created in a standard format. 'Zotero is a free, open source extension for the Firefox browser, that enables users to collect, manage, and cite research from all types of sources from the browser. It is used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. On many major research websites including Libraries Australia, Zotero detects when a book, article, or other resource is being viewed and with a mouse click finds and saves the full reference information to a local file.'  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zotero . A guide on how to use this function in Libraries Australia is available: www.nla.gov.au/librariesaustralia/documents/LACOinS.pdf.

Libraries Australia and OCLC achieve breakthrough in timeliness

Since signing a collaborative services agreement with OCLC on 1 July 2007, Libraries Australia has worked to ensure that members obtain maximum value from OCLC services. In January, an exciting new method for sending records to WorldCat was introduced – SRU Record Update. This protocol for data synchronisation ensures rapid record sharing. www.nla.gov.au/librariesaustralia/documents/SRU_press_release.pdf.

The full suite of OCLC services available to Libraries Australia members is described at: www.nla.gov.au/librariesaustralia/documents/faq_oclc_agreement.pdf.

 Welcoming new collections

Our thanks go to Willoughby City Library which has enriched the Australia National Bibliographic Database by providing a file of over 1,700 music score records. Of these 343 are brand new to Libraries Australia including AN44205555, AN44205563, and AN44205591.

On 22 May this year, the National Library released a Prototype of its new integrated discovery service. During the following month, the Prototype generated considerable discussion in blogs and forums in Australia and overseas. In the Library Journal blog, Roy Tennant of OCLC called it 'one stop searching with a can-do attitude' (http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1090000309/post/1900044990.html).

The Prototype, as yet unbranded, can be found at http://sbdsproto.nla.gov.au.

The Library commenced the development of this new discovery service in August 2008, with the aim of improving and replacing its current free search services to the public. There are currently eight of these services:

• Libraries Australia free search service
• Picture Australia
• Music Australia
• Australian Research Online
• Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts
• Australia Dancing
• PANDORA search service
• Australian Newspapers Beta.

In 2007 the Library decided that it could not go on building additional silo discovery services. It resolved to integrate all of these services through a project called the 'Single Business Discovery Project'.

The Library has also embarked on a new program to aggregate biographical metadata, the People Australia program. This data will support discovery of information in Australian web-based biographical services. The new discovery service will be the vehicle for searching this aggregated data.

The new discovery service will provide access to a significantly greater range of resources from a wider range of sources, including more full-text content. It will enhance ease of discovery through improved relevance ranking, refinement by facets, and FRBR grouping of related items. You can find more background about the Project in the Libraries Australia Advisory Committee paper which is referred to at: https://wiki.nla.gov.au/display/LABS/2.+Single+Business+Discovery+Project.

Some people will argue that 'all discovery should be left to Google' but the National Library still thinks that there is strong justification for this Project:

• try as we might, we can't get Google to harvest all or even most of the data that we are currently aggregating in programs like Picture Australia
• we want to preference Australian collections in the relevance ranking (this is the focus of our service)
• we want users to exploit the tailored search refinement facets that we have developed (eg for narrowing searches of newspaper articles).

The National Library intends to seek additional content for this service, such as high level collection guides and finding aids from libraries and archives, and article-level metadata for e-journals from participating vendors and aggregators.

The Library is also working closely with the State and Territory libraries through the 'Connecting and Discovering Content' Project of the NSLA Re-imagining Library Services initiative. Discussions have started concerning additional content that could be contributed by NSLA members, and how those libraries can use the National Library’s data aggregation within their own online services.

You are invited to try out the Prototype, if you haven’t done so already, and to contribute comments through the Feedback box on the Home Page.

Libcitations: A Measure for Comparative Assessment of Book Publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences, February 2009, dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.21045.

Discusses how the ANBD was mined to produce citation counts for the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative for the Universities of New South Wales and Sydney.

Statement on the Global Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Consortial Licenses, International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLOC) January 2009. www.library.yale.edu/consortia/icolc-econcrisis-0109.htm.

The key mission of Libraries Australia is to support the workflows of Australian libraries. It is a national not-for-profit collaboration which provides workflow services in exchange for a cost-recovery subscription fee.

The benefits to member libraries are:

1. use of all of the ANBD data to meet copy cataloguing needs, and find all of that data in one place;
2. unlimited access to WorldCat - and other external databases - simultaneously, giving a high copy cataloguing hit rate;
3. inclusion of Blackwells TOC data, not easily available elsewhere, which enhances the member libraries’ catalogues;
4. assistance in making environmental transitions such as migration to new cataloguing standards (including Resource Description & Access);
5. full use of the national interlibrary loan system (LADD) – or, utilise a fully tested interconnection between their local ILL system and LADD – and the associated payments service;
6. workflow advice through the Libraries Australia Help Desk, whenever it’s needed;
7. ability to offer local communities alerting services through the personalisation features of Libraries Australia Search;
8. real time synchronisation of catalogue data of member libraries to the global catalogue WorldCat, ensuring visibility of Australian collections to a global community;
9. engagement between libraries in both formal and informal spaces online and offline, to share advice on workflow issues;
10. influence over the future directions of the service through the Libraries Australia Advisory Committee.

Libraries Australia is hosted by the National Library. Its value is explained in full at www.nla.gov.au/librariesaustralia/documents/supporting_australian_libraries.pdf
 

When the details of our exciting programme for the Libraries Australia Forum in November will be published.