National Library of Australia


PICTURES CATALOGUE

Project participants: National Library of Australia
Contact officer/s: Linda Groom, Pictorial Librarian (email lgroom@nla.gov.au or phone 02 6262 1395).
Project description: Pictures Catalogue is a resource discovery service providing access to items in the National Library of Australia's pictorial collection, some of which have digital surrogates. The main purposes are improved access, especially for people outside the Canberra region, and streamlining of photographic reproductions services. There are also preservation benefits through reduced handling of original material.
URL of site: http://www.nla.gov.au/catalogue/pictures
URL for project information: http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/jthomp2.html http://www.nla.gov.au/catalogue/pictures/about.html
Content: All images are digital copies of items in the National Library's Pictorial Collection, which contains over 600,000 items. The Collection covers topics related to Australia and the Australian people, with some coverage of Papua New Guinea, the Antarctic, the Pacific and other countries in the region. Topics include social history, transport, agriculture, mining, industry, leisure, performing arts, the growth of cities, as well as portraits of significant Australians. Types of material include oil paintings, watercolours, prints, posters, photographs and some three dimensional objects. The subset of the collection that has been digitised includes examples from all the above topics and types of material, but with more emphasis, so far, rarer works from the late 18th and the 19th centuries. Over 30,000 images with an expected annual growth rate of over 10,000 images.
Digitisation policy and priorities: New acquisitions; material most used (including material used in NLA exhibitions and publications); high profile collections eg Nan Kivell Collection; provided copyright allows.
http://www.nla.gov.au/policy/digitisation.html
Timetable: 1995- ongoing
Budget and funding:
Staff resources: Until May 2001 digitisation of most material was performed by Scott Four Colour Print, a Perth-based company, which was selected through a tender process. From July 2001 digisation has been preformed by National Libray Staff.
Technical standards: Masters are tiffs, with at least 300 dpi resolution.
Cataloguing and indexing: MARC records created on Libraries Australia. Catalogue records are downloaded to an in-house management system. The converted format is aligned with Dublin Core. An enhancement is planned to migrate to a more heirarchical data structure.
Comments:

Project managers wishing to update the details of their Australian digitisation projects, should email the changes to alg@nla.gov.au.

Last modified: February 15 2006.