Australian Subject Gateways Forum

Best Practice Checklist for Australian Subject Gateways

This best practice checklist for Australian subject gateways has been derived after close consultation with the gateway projects collaborating in the Australian Subject Gateways Forum, and with Commonwealth government information gateways under the auspices of the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) initiative. Each Australian gateway project has sought to emulate the best practices established by previous projects.

The National Library has developed this core set of content, business, and functional characteristics to stimulate further debate on the coherent development of gateways, and to provide Australian gateways with a common framework for participating in the cooperative development of both national and overseas gateways. This document was revised in consultation with the Australian Subject Gateways Forum in February 2001.

Definitions for Web-Based Services may also be of interest.

Comments are welcome - please send them to the Library's Coordination Support Branch at: csb@nla.gov.au.

Content Characteristics

  1. The gateway may describe both print and electronic resources. It should be noted that gateways currently carry with them an expectation of access to content in real time.
  2. The gateway may include professionally produced descriptions of the resources. Such descriptions may pertain to the content of the resource, in a form ranging from a short annotation to a review. Metadata will be applied to facilitate the description of other attributes of the resource, such as its title, author, format or location.
  3. The resource types included may describe people, places, events, services or works.
  4. Works may be described at collection, whole item, part item or analytical level.
  5. Resources should be indexed according to a recognised subject classification scheme in order to enable subject browsing. Controlled vocabulary systems such as subject heading lists and thesauri should be used in this process.
  6. The resources described in the gateway may be uniquely Australian, or of high use value within Australia.
  7. The resources linked from the gateway must go through a selection process conducted by the jurisdiction responsible for the gateway, to ensure a high level of quality and relevance to the subject matter. There should be a written policy listing selection criteria to facilitate this process.
  8. The resources must have their currency maintained. This may be managed by sub-jurisdictional partners through human intervention, or by an automated process, or by a combination of both strategies. There should be a written policy detailing collection maintenance issues and procedures.
  9. The metadata describing the resources in the gateway must meet a recognised standard for resource discovery such as the Dublin Core, the Australian and New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC) metadata schema, the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS), EdNA Metadata Standard or MARC Standards.
  10. Extensions to the above-listed metadata may be created, but must be managed through cooperative, responsible and secure processes, to ensure Australian best practice in standards application.
  11. The copyright of resources linked from the gateway may be managed by the sub-jurisdictional partners or by the host partner.

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Business Characteristics

  1. The gateway should be hosted in Australia, although it may be mirrored internationally.
  2. The gateway host should have recognised jurisdictional carriage of the subject area, either through a statutory or other clear obligation.
  3. Contributions to the gateway are typically made by a range of partnered organisations and institutions, not a single business entity.
  4. The gateway should be promoted through more than one Australian entry point.
  5. The gateway may provide links to other Australian, and overseas, gateways.
  6. The gateway must ensure the long-term sustainability of its service, which may be addressed by a strategic plan covering business and marketing issues.
  7. The gateway should address the responsibility of long-term access to content by taking on a management and preservation role for the Australian resources within its purview, or by supporting national initiatives which aim to do so, such as PANDORA (see also the paper: Subject Gateways and the National Library of Australia PANDORA Archive) and the work on persistent identification (as summarised in PADI).

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Functional Characteristics

  1. The gateway must support both browse and search access through the use of a metadata-enabled search engine and other value-added features.
  2. The selection criteria used to identify resources, and the metadata schema used to describe them, should be made publicly accessible.
  3. The Web access component of the gateway must support a link to the actual content of a resource or its digital surrogate.
  4. The gateway may provide links to related free or paid services, but without a mandatory requirement to provide e-commerce support for them. It should be noted that gateways currently carry with them an expectation of free access.
  5. Access to each type of resource may be exploited by alternative entry points within the same gateway.
  6. The gateway should meet accessibility criteria as outlined by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, in their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The content should be accessible to everyone, including users with disabilities and users of text-only browsers.
  7. The gateway should make provision to support a standard form of cross-gateway-searching, such as Z39.50 or HTTP.

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Other Best Practice Documents

DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook - designed and written with the specific aim of highlighting best practice and the latest technologies behind information gateways.

Renardus: Gateways Defined - provides a set of quality-controlled subject gateways' quality measures which support systematic resource discovery.

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Document History

Initial Draft: May 1999 by Debbie Campbell, NLA
Addition to Draft: October 2000 by Barbara Rozmus, NLA
Revision: February 2001 by Nicole Van Kempen, Louise Arkles and Barbara Rozmus
Update: February 2003 by Barbara Rozmus

Date last verified: 14 January 2004

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