National Library of Australia Staff Papers, 2005

Font Size:  Small  Medium  Large

Libraries Australia: Simplifying the Search Experience

Tony Boston, Bemal Rajapatirana, Roxanne Missingham

Abstract


The National Library of Australia is redeveloping its Kinetica service. A new search service called Libraries Australia was released in late 2004 which aims to simplify the search experience and improve performance for Kinetica users. The new service incorporates improvements such as parallel searching of multiple databases; Google-like searching with phrase, synonym and spell-checking features; results sorting options; an alerting service and improved options to get bibliographic items in Library collections; and other services such as online bookshops. A specification for application of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) to the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD) is also described. FRBR provides a conceptual model for the entities of interest to users of bibliographic records and defines a hierarchy of work, expression, manifestation and item entities. In a future release of Libraries Australia, it is planned to use FRBR concepts to simplify the search experience for users by clustering of results as has been done recently by a number of North American bibliographic agencies.

Full Text: PDF