A paper presented by Debbie Campbell at the Australian Registrars' Committee Professional Development Seminar 2000, 5-6- October, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The focus of PictureAustralia is on access. It provides a single World Wide Web gateway to the distributed digitised pictorial collections of the image providers participating [PICTUREAUSTRALIA]. The inaugural participants were the State Libraries of New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria, the National Library and the Australian War Memorial.
The participants have agreed on the following points for access:
In PictureAustralia, activities associated with management and preservation of collections remain with the image providers. This allows those collections of digitised images to be repurposed in many ways, and indeed, each image provider already hosted its own Web site for its own images before joining PictureAustralia. However, this is not a criterion for participation.
Agencies embarking on new digitisation work are utilising the opportunity of PictureAustralia's existence to establish their image digitisation and metadata creation processes in such a way that the results are available to different gateways with a minimum of additional effort. Each agency may therefore provide their images and metadata to their own institutional gateway, to PictureAustralia, and to an educational service provider such as the national Australian Museums and Galleries OnLine network, AMOL. University libraries are an example of an agency who want to provide images to a number of services. As they have some experience in digitising full-text and making it available, they can now digitise under-utilised collections of images which were created as part of faculty research and exist in a range of formats including architectural slides and glass plates. Many universities also have their own museums and galleries or art collections which would have increased use if made available via the Web, particularly for Australians in regional and remote areas.
Its hybrid architecture allows PictureAustralia to be a vehicle that brings attention to the collection of each participating image provider. In fact, this type of architecture is similar to that deployed by AMOL (a central metadata repository with links to distributed collections). The difference is that PictureAustralia has endeavoured to be far-reaching cross-sectorally, because the participants believe that the issues for enhancing access are the same, no matter who we are or what we take care of. The National Library also provides an international gateway to information about Preserving Access to Digital Information, known as PADI [PADI]. And since Phase I of the project which developed PictureAustralia, the inaugural image providers have been joined by the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland, and the National Archives of Australia.
Although some of the participating agencies have been providing digital surrogates of their images for some time, digitisation is conducted on a selective basis. That is, while many of the images in the participants' collections are described, they do not all have associated digitised images. At the National Library for example, we digitise routinely as we acquire new materials. We only selectively retrospectively digitise our existing collection of pictorial items, according to demand for activities such as online exhibitions. However, making the descriptions available allows for 'digitisation on demand' to be invoked. This is explained in full in the National Library's recently released digitisation policy [NLADIG].
At a recent international library conference, digitisation was not to be an activity which ensures preservation, rather it is considered necessary to deliver access. There is a secondary benefit of conservation of the original item due to the minimisation of the need to access the original item after digitisation. It is possible to take this one step further, by choosing digitisation and description processes which are standards-based. And this will also have a flow-on effect of facilitating migration to new software as it is made available, without having to resort to the original again for redigitisation in the future.
The conference example used was newspapers on microform. The British Library, the Library of Congress, and scholars involved in the Early English Imprints Project have agreed that the availability and performance of scanning and optical character recognition software is sufficient to digitise the microform copy of newspapers for increased access. Standards are a key to this activity. PictureAustralia only required a resource discovery standard to be applied because other metadata to support management and preservation of images are kept by the image providers in other schemas. For example, the National Library has made a preservation metadata schema for digital collections available for comment while monitoring international activities at the same time [PRESERVATION].
In PictureAustralia, we have applied a process of taking descriptive data from a variety of legacy formats, albeit very rich formats, and converting it to a single structured schema suitable for resource discovery, the Dublin Core. It is then possible to convert this standard schema to a newer enhanced schema in the future. Similarly the JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group) format, which was independently chosen by all the participating image providers as the preferred standard for image rendition, should be easy to migrate from because it is a universally recognised standard. In that sense, digitisation is ensuring access in the longer term.
The JPEG standard also allows the image providers to create more than one rendition of each image, a thumbnail version, a medium resolution version for larger display, and sometimes a watermarked version. Even the thumbnail-sized version, if of a very high resolution, allows a person to become 'enamoured of the work'. Remote users do not have to access the original to derive the same benefits from our collections as users on-the-spot. To see more examples of national digitisation projects aiming for this goal, please visit the National Library's Web pages dedicated to information sharing in this area [PROJECTS].
| [PICTUREAUSTRALIA] | http://www.pictureaustralia.org |
| [PADI] | Preserving Access to Digital Information http://www.nla.gov.au/padi |
| [NLADIG] | National Library of Australia Digitisation Policy 2000-2004
http://www.nla.gov.au/policy/digitisation.html |
| [PRESERVATION] | Preservation Metadata for Digital Collections Exposure Draft
http://www.nla.gov.au/preserve/pmeta.html |
| [PROJECTS] | Australian digitisation projects http://www.nla.gov.au/libraries/digitisation/ |
Author: Debbie Campbell, Manager Infrastructure Projects, Coordination
Support Branch, National Library of Australia,
dcampbel@nla.gov.au
Article Title:
"A Balancing Act: PictureAustralia"
Author: Debbie
Campbell
Publication Date: 5-Oct-2000
Publication: Australian Registrars
Committee Quarterly Newsletter
URL:
http://www.amol.org.au/craft/aus_mus/registrars.asp
Acknowledgement:
Danielle Freeman, Coordination Support Branch, NLA
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