Building the Mother of all Collections: the future of the National Library’s discovery

services

Warwick Cathro

Assistant Director-General, InnovationNational Library of Australia

National Library role

• Collecting, access, coordination roles• Strong focus on national discovery services• Support for research• Strong interest in participating in research

infrastructure development

Our medium term direction

• Build digital collections– web archives– newspaper and other “industrial scale” digitisation

• Restructure national discovery services• Be involved in ANDS

– such as support for a National Persistent Identifier Service (if selected)

Restructuring the national discovery services

• Implement a Service Oriented Architecture– move to discrete, loosely coupled, shareable, functional service

components– use a “service framework” based on the JISC/DEST e-Framework

• Establish a virtually integrated “national metadata store”– “collection views” of that store– manage the national discovery service in an integrated way

Our goals

• For users:– provide access to a wider and more coherent set

of data which exposes Australian collections

– improve the search experience

• For the National Library:– maintain discovery services more effectively

– IT Architecture Group report:• http://www.nla.gov.au/dsp/documents/itag.pdf

The problem: silos

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High level model

DiscoveryService

AuthenticationService

SearchService

AnnotationService

RequestService

Newspapers View

Journals ViewPictures

ViewMusic View

National metadata store

Content of the national metadata store

• Full text indexes:– national digital newspaper collection

– other digitised full text content (books, journals ...)

– oral history transcripts

– national web archives (PANDORA, whole domain harvest)

– biographical information

• Metadata:– Australian National Bibliographic Database

– journal indexing data

– finding aids

– pictures metadata

What it might look like

In Australian libraries Online Australian

All Newspapers Journals Pictures Maps more >>

Advanced search Preferences

TM

In my libraries

What makes it unique

• A place for Australians to start a search that:– enables Australians to understand ourselves

and our place in the world– gives prominence to information in Australia’s

collecting institutions– is seen as authoritative, impartial, non-

commercial

Types of collection view

• Format views:– Books, Journals, Newspapers, Theses, Pictures,

Film & video, Music scores, Audio, Maps, Archives & manuscripts, Data sets, Web archives

• Topic views– People, Places, Concepts , Events

• “Specialisations”– Disciplines (history, music, ...)– Contexts (eg “research outputs”)

Displaying the views

You searched on “alfred deakin”

Summary of hits:

Books View (351) Journals View (1121) Newspapers View (13,799) Theses View (19) Pictures View (390) Film & Video View (78) Archives & Manuscripts View (410) More

Topics: 1. Deakin, Alfred, 1856-1919 – Australian Dictionary of Biography Online 2. Alfred Deakin – Wikipedia entry 3. Alfred Deakin – Australia’s Prime Ministers Portal More

Hits from Books View: 1. Alfred Deakin / J A La Nauze. 1962. 2. The federal story / by Alfred Deakin. 1944. 3. Alfred Deakin: a sketch / Walter Murdoch. 1923. More Hits from Google Books: 1. The crisis in Victorian politics, 1879-1881. 2. Australian liberals and the moral middle class: from Alfred Deakin to John Howard. More

Refine your search:

Published 1860-1879 (100) Published 1880-1899 (66) Published 1900-1919 (114) Other facets

Newspaper view

Collection view: Journals

• Information about all Australian journals– including library holdings

• External targets– Google Scholar– Informit indexes and full text– ERA (Electronic Resources Australia) targets

• APAIS and AMI indexing data– business model transition

• Potential for incorporating digitised text from out-of-copyright journals

Defining a “Research View”

• Would encompass several formats:– scholarly books, journal articles, pre-prints, theses,

data sets ...

• Data harvested from university repositories• Downstream harvesting by Google Scholar

and other aggregators

• External targets:– Google Scholar itself– Future ANDS Discovery Service– Data sets in the ABS National Data Network

The NLA and ANDS

• ANDS service providers not known for several months

• NLA might provide some Utilities Program services

• In any case data sets, theses etc. could be external targets for our discovery service

• Relationship of ARROW Discovery Service to ANDS Utilities Program

Collection Services Registry

• Included in vision of ANDS Utilities Program

• Will support discovery:– facilitate selection of targets for federated

search

– describe services

– machine/machine capabilities

• Prototype ORCA Registry

Example 1

Example 2

Where are we up to?

• Formed an internal “Business Integration Taskforce”

• Is developing a prototype of new discovery service

• Have started to develop some service framework components (eg Harvest)

• We envisage a staged transition to the new model:– Stage 1 may involve the NBD (Libraries

Australia free search service), newspaper data, people data