Subject Gateways and the National Library of Australia PANDORA Archive
Paper presented by Pam Gatenby, National Library of Australia, to the Australian Subject Gateways Forum meeting on 30 August 2000
1. The National Library of Australia aims to build a comprehensive collection of Australian publications to ensure that Australians have access to their documentary heritage now and in the future. By 1996 it became apparent that a significant amount of Australian publishing was occurring on the Internet. Some of these publications could only be found online; there was no print equivalent. The Library decided that a commitment must be made to preserving online publications of lasting cultural value. To do this, the PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia) Project was established in 1996 to build an archive of selected Australian online publications.
2. In broad terms, to be selected for national preservation in PANDORA, a significant proportion of an online publication should be about Australia or be on a subject of social, political, cultural, scientific or economic significance and relevance to Australia and be written by an Australian author. Detailed selection guidelines are available at http://www.nla.gov.au/scoap/guidelines.html
3. The first title was archived in PANDORA in May 1997. Procedures for selecting, gathering and archiving titles have been streamlined over the past 3 years and there are now more than 600 titles in the PANDORA Archive. The main sources of publications are the academic sector, government, community groups and the not-for-profit sector.
4. The huge volume of information available on the Internet makes the task of identifying publications for inclusion in PANDORA a difficult one. The large search engines do not pick up many of the publications of interest to PANDORA and Legal Deposit does not yet apply to digital publications. The Library therefore must pursue other avenues for seeking out relevant publications for archiving. Cooperation with producers and distributors of online publications is one way in which the Library is trying to carry out this task more effectively.
5. Subject gateway managers could assist the Library to identify relevant resources more easily for PANDORA, in a number of ways. These are listed below, not in any order of priority, for consideration. Ideally, PANDORA would like an easy way to identify publications that are available in online format only.
6. It would assist the National Library if subject gateways could do any or all of the following:
- Provide a link from their home pages to the PANDORA online registration form (http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pandora/registration_form.html).
- Provide a What's New service that lists those resources recently added to the Gateway. It would be helpful if this could also be searched, or at least sorted by domain. An indication of how frequently the What's New service is updated would also be useful.
- Allowing both browsing and searching of subject gateway resources
by domain, i.e. limit to Australia only. Some subject gateways already provide
this facility. It would be helpful if this option was available across all
gateways.
- Enabling the site search or What's New feature of the subject gateway to alert users to types of publications included (e.g. e-journals).
- Providing an option for email notification of new resources. This
service would be of even greater interest to PANDORA if it could be limited to
just Australian resources or particular types of resources i.e., a SDI
type profiling.
- Giving a clear indication on the site of where the information is derived from, how resources are selected and what is considered to be in scope. This would help PANDORA by indicating sources that are not being covered by subject gateways so that our identification efforts can be focused on these missed areas.
- Promoting the use of or adding structured metadata to the sites included in the gateways. This would be beneficial for both resource discovery and preservation purposes. Subject gateways could assist the Library through use of metadata in particular by including a special metadata tag to indicate whether a resource is available online only (i.e., it doesnt have a print equivalent.). In Dublin Core it might be possible to use the Relation element. This element is an identifier of a second resource and its relationship to the present resource. A clear definition of how this element should be used is still under development. Perhaps it could be used to show whether there was a print equivalent. If it was applied comprehensively, then the absence of the "print" value in this element could indicate that the resource was online only. A search function on the subject gateway site that provided an option for directly doing a search on the Relation element using the Boolean NOT operator would then be needed. Some subject gateways already provide limited searching of the Relation element, but usually only as a secondary search or qualifier applied in conjunction with a title or subject search.
7. Other suggestions on how best to identify publications available online only would be very welcome.
8. Subject gateways could also assist the National Library in implementing its national strategy for a distributed collection of online publications by promoting use of standard practices and implementing them in their gateways. For instance, the Library will soon be issuing archiving guidelines for creators of online publications to ensure their publications can be accessed into the future, and is working on a model for a distributed national persistent naming scheme. We will report on these at a future meeting.
Date last verified: 19 January 2005
