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Metadata Harvesting
Australian publishers of information began to move to electronic and online media in the 1990's and this has accelerated in the new millennium. There is a rapidly growing trend towards online publishing, as shown by an increase of over 900% in records for online Australian government publications since 2000.
Metadata harvesting is designed to help creators of Australian electronic resources in the government, academic and commercial sectors to share their metadata with the National Library of Australia for inclusion in the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD)
The purpose of including records describing Australian digital publications in the ANBD is to make them available to the Australian library community. Metadata is a national resource which permits direct access to publications across the national information infrastructure by its creation, use, storage and sharing. It is also important to contribute metadata to union catalogues such as the ANBD for further distribution to other databases reaching far beyond their originally limited realm of distribution. The real value of metadata lies in its distribution because this enables information about publications to be available at many different access points; the wider the distribution, the greater the value.
Contributing your metadata
Metadata presented in a
standard way can be sent to or collected by the National Library through a
regular automated process (harvester). Please Contact
Us for further details of what is required to set up one of these
processes.
After agency files have been harvested by the National Library, they will be converted to the MARC format, an international standard format common to the library and information sector. Any mandatory codes or fields required for loading the data will be added by the National Library to enrich your data and improve resource discovery.
Please consult our Guidelines for Contributing Metadata or Contact Us for further details of what is required to set up one of these processes.

