Northern Territory Library: Overview of Digital Activities

Presentation by Michael Loos, Northern Territory Library at the National Consultative Meeting on the Management of Australian Physical-Format Digital Publications, National Library of Australia, October 27-28 1997

Initially, let me explain that the Northern Territory Library (NTL) is a division of the Department of Housing & Local Government. The Department’s policy is that all funds for computer related activities are pooled centrally with the IT division, and the Department has to be convinced of the advantages of each library project over, say, a new system to send out Housing Commission rent notices. All computer-related activities must be channelled through IT, who are also responsible for the initial installation and subsequent maintenance of all equipment and software. This does make life hard for us. We were used to doing things for ourselves, because if we didn’t nothing happened, but now we are forbidden to do anything in the IT area without their say-so. We have to put up business plans and wait for IT to implement what is approved. It takes days for a public access PC which is malfunctioning, to be looked at, let alone put right. All extremely frustrating.

NTL is in the process of restructuring, and has been for a number of months. NTL has been divided into three branches (Territory Reference Service, Collection Management and Client Services), instead of the old five (Computer Services and Support Services have both been subsumed by Collection Management), and the new Directors are due to take up duties within a couple of weeks. After this new strategies will be put in place.

Let me also declare my abysmal ignorance of most things computer - with a bit of an effort I can use the word-processing and e-mail facilities on my PC, and I can manage to do a basic search on the Internet. But take me out into the deep water of fuzzy logic, multiplexes, pixels and the like and I am floundering. To me, Java is either an island or coffee. The achievements we have made in this area are due solely to the efforts of a few self-taught dedicated officers, in our case mainly library technicians, not even librarians. My special area of interest is NAC - the Northern Australia Collection. As such I am the preservation officer at NTL, which is how I am here today.

I should also add at this point that the Northern Territory has no legal deposit legislation. This was put up to Cabinet on a couple of occasions, and the last time in the late 80s we were told that the community was not ready for such legislation.

Most of the CD-ROMs and disks we hold are indexes and databases, such as AUSTROM, Eric and GPO. These are generally networked through towers, or, as is the case with GPO, provided through a stand-alone work station. Some are held at the reference desk and made available on request (such as Encarta, Victorian Pioneers Index, etc.). The reason for this is purely practical (or rather impractical). We ran out of space on the towers, and couldn’t get approval for new or larger ones.

There are a few monographic CD-ROMs (if I can use this term) - the Wran Committee on Darwin, Long time, olden time, etc. - and they generally seem to be in the NAC area, rather than in the general collection. If the truth be told, I think we avoided purchasing items in this format, except in the case of indexes, etc., whereas NAC policy is that anything to do with the NT is acquired, regardless of format.

Until very recently, NAC purely stock-piled the CD-ROMs purchased, as we had no suitable hardware. A couple of months ago a PC was bought, so the CD-ROMs have now been mounted on this.

As far as producing CD-ROMs, we did produce two or three versions of our union catalogue, tailored to show only the appropriate library’s holdings, but these cost money!! The last edition is now some 18 months old, and it is not intended to bring out another edition.

We are also in the process of digitising our photograph collection, and hope to have some 60,000 images accessible through CD-ROM very soon. The existing system is a laser-based one, the disk now some 4 years old and contains about 45,000 images. The CDs are ready and waiting and we are attempting to persuade our IT people that we need hardware and programs.

We have established an Internet homepage, and to date have concentrated on the associated NAC homepage. This has the text of selected Occasional Papers (the Library’s main publishing activity), and in future these will be produced only on the Internet - the last 2 Papers have already been released exclusively on the Net. We have also commissioned a local historian to write some 5 or 6 short biographical sketches of “Territory characters” which will be migrated to the Net within a couple of weeks. AIR (Australian Indigenous Resources) is also due to go live next month - this is a linking of various institutions holding Aboriginal materials.

But our most ambitious project is a multi-media package on Cyclone Tracy. This will consist of a brief history of Tracy and its effect, physical and social, on Darwin, a meteorological overview of cyclones in general and Tracy in particular (including an animated track of Tracy across the Timor Sea), and interviews with survivors, all copiously illustrated with photographs from our collections. Initially this will go on the Internet, but there is the possibility of making it into a CD-ROM for commercial sale - the 25th anniversary of Tracy is 1999.

A strategy is currently being worked on for the rationalisation of our many and varied systems of access to CD-ROMs/disks, and the formulation of an unified networking policy. The installation of a new library package to replace our old and creaking Dobis/Libis system will also help.

Now preservation - what preservation?!! The only thing we have done with our own products is to print out copies of the unique material - the Occasional Papers not published in printed form, and the sketches of Territory characters.

With many of the commercial CD-ROMs, we are only concerned with long-term preservation of the items in NAC, and to date most of these - certainly not all, but most - replicate hard copies, as with the Aboriginal Encyclopaedia and the Wran Committee reports.

We certainly do not have a strategy for long-term preservation of unique items, at any rate, not at the moment.


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Last updated 6 January 1998
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