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A central issue for the Library over the past 100 years has been the geographical
isolation of Canberra from much of Australia. The country’s vast distances
have denied many Australians the opportunity of visiting the Library.
In recent years, however, new developments in technology have seen the
Library generate more and more national services, facilitating collaboration
between libraries and cultural institutions and through this, providing
the nation beyond Canberra with access to the Library’s collections. Over
the past 30 years innovative technologies have advanced the Library's
commitment to service the research needs of the nation.
Computer-connected
or online technologies have been used by the Library since the mid-1970s,
when it first began looking at overseas models for an online cataloguing
system. By 1981 the Library was ready to launch the Australian
Bibliographical Network (ABN), an online system connecting libraries
computerised catalogues around Australia to the newly formed National
Bibliographic Database (NBD) set up at the National Library.
For
researchers and scholars the benefits from the creation of the ABN and
NBD have been enormous. A shared bibliographic database, or ‘union catalogue’,
has meant that people can access library holdings without travelling to
the Library. Shared resources and fast and effective methods of communicating
between libraries have also sped up the process of inter-library loans.
By 1985, 90 Australian libraries were using the National Library's Australian
Bibliographic Network to locate items from the National Bibliographic
Database for inter-library loan. By 1999, over 1100 libraries were using
the service. Later that year, however, the Australian Bibliographic Network
was replaced by Kinetica, a more sophisticated and interactive
system, that enables libraries to contribute their own cataloguing details
through Kinetica to the National Bibliographic Database.
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