National Library of Australia


Multimedia catalogue

Project participants: State Library of Victoria with the Victorian Rural Water Commission, who donated their photographic collection.
Contact officer/s: Jill Wilson, Manager Information Resources (email jwilson@slv.vic.gov.au, phone 03 9669 9815 or fax 03 9663 1480)
Project description: Provision of online access to digital copies of materials held within our collection. 122, 000 records have been made available via our Web site with brief MARC records, using software called WebPAC.
URL of site: http://slv950.slv.vic.gov.au/webpac-bin/wgbroker?new+-access+top.image
URL for project information: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/digitising/ - NB* article is from 1997 and considerable progress has been made since then.
Content: Approximately 3% of the entire collection is involved in this digitisation project. Material digitised included photographs, sound recordings, video, handwritten as well as typed materials, 3-D objects, paintings and other formats.
Digitisation policy and priorities: Digitisation policy developed by staff, on Cornell University Library's "Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives" publication. Online policy developed based on other policies available but not incorporated within the organisation's business plan. Digitisation is becoming Library practice. Collections in special areas will acquire, catalogue and digitally capture items at the same time.
Timetable: 1990- ongoing
Budget and funding: Internal, State and Commonwealth government as well as private funding - $A500,000 - $A1,000,000.
Staff resources: Original digital work was outsourced now all material is digitised internally by cataloguers who are also trained digitisers/scanners and digital photographers.
Technical standards: Scan at 400dpi to produce a minimum of 2 meg black and white TIF or a 5 meg colour TIF, the resolution is increased if this size isn't achieved. Images are converted to JPEGS using Image Alchemy to standardize size to 600 pixels across by appropriate length. Hardware used for digitisation: Gateway 2000 Pentium 200 with 64Meg of RAM and 2 Gigabytes of disk space; Capturing equipment: Umax Powerlook 2000 Scanner Minolta RD175 Digital Camera. Currently back ups are being made on DAT tape. We are looking at using CD-ROM backup.
Cataloguing and indexing: Each digital item has the fifteen tags recommended by the Dublin Core. Not all tags are appropriate for some items. Where possible as many as can be used are included in a record. Copyright and reproduction rights are attached to all files. Copyright issues are being monitored by a group of Multimedia producers for the Victorian Arts agencies. The group called artvicmm comprises of representatives from the Museum of Victoria, the State Library of Victoria, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Public Record Office, Cinemedia, Victorian Arts Centre Trust, the Botanical Gardens and the Performing Arts Museum. Arts Victoria and Multimedia Victoria also attend these meetings.
Comments: Digitisation in-house has been very beneficial and cost effective and staff have been provided with the opportunity to increase their skill level.

Project managers wishing to update the details of their Australian digitisation projects, should send the changes to ALG Administration.

Last modified: October 16 2009.