National Library of Australia Staff Papers, 1996

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Hanging out the Pictures

All the world can now access IMAGES 1, a showcase for the National Library's rich Pictorial Collection, via the Internet. John Thompson reports for the October 1996 issue of National Library of Australia News.

For the best part of a century, the National Library of Australia has been accumulating a rich collection of Australian materials in a range of formats: books, pictures, manuscripts, oral history recordings, maps and music. The development of this collection has been one of the Library's greatest services to the Australian people, the gathering together of materials which underpin the history and culture of a country and a people. But, prodigious task though it has been and remains, it has never been enough merely to build the collection. The real test has been its accessibility. In earlier times, perhaps, it was enough that the collection existed, a resource to be used in leisurely fashion by those scholars and researchers privileged to live in Canberra or supported by their universities to visit the federal capital to gain access to the national collection.

In the 1980's and 1990's, as economic rationalism began to bite, the National Library thought afresh about its service and access policies, reflecting on the ways in which the investment in the building of a great collection might yield a better return to a wider community of Australians. Cultural and collecting institutions throughout the country have faced a similar challenge. Public programs of various kinds including travelling exhibitions have significantly improved the access by Australians from all walks of life to an extraordinary range and variety of cultural heritage material while a new generation of curators has begun the task of interpreting their collections to meet different audience needs and to raise community awareness. Access and equity have become important watch words.


[Grose Head]

ABOVE: Thomas Heawood. View from the Top of Grose Head c. 1874 engraving; sheet 19.5 x 26.5 cm. From the Pictorial Collection.

In the state capital cities, with their larger populations and, perhaps, a more easily definable audience, this task of reaching out has yielded remarkable improvements in community participation. In Canberra, the cultural and collecting institutions have faced a greater challenge both in defining their audience and in ensuring that their resources are shared equitably with Australians in various parts of the country. Although institutions such as the National Library, the National Gallery, Australian Archives and the Australian War Memorial have each developed impressive travelling exhibition programs and have grappled seriously with the task of extending their services to a new and wider audience, all are constrained by costs and the reality that Australia is a large country with , relatively speaking, a small but geographically dispersed population. It is disappointing that an idea persists that the national collecting institutions located in Canberra sit in other-worldly isolation on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin.

In the 1990's, with the widespread penetration of the Internet, it is now possible to overcome one of the tyrannies of distance and to deliver desk top access to significant components of the national collection in homes and workplaces across the country as well as internationally. Like other institutions, the National Library has been quick to exploit the potential of the Internet to break down the barriers of distance which have separated a vast potential audience from access to collections of heritage material. The Library's most recent achievement in the creative use of technology to enhance user access to its collections has been to make available through the World Wide Web more than 13,000 images from its extensive Pictorial Collection in a new online service called IMAGES 1. The development of this service has been a cooperative effort by staff from different parts of the Library combining traditional curatorial and cataloguing skills with cutting edge technological expertise to realise a dream of user accessibility which was unattainable even only a few years ago. Like its American counterpart, the United States Library of Congress, the National Library in Canberra has a vision to provide digitised access to the most interesting and educationally valuable core of its collections thereby creating a whole new audience of users. In the words of James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, 'schools, libraries, and homes will have access to new and important material in their own localities along with the same freedom readers have always had within public reading rooms to interpret, rearrange, and use material for their own individual needs.'


[Gilderoy Giant] [Washing Day]

ABOVE LEFT: Afternoon Tea in a Gilderoy Giant Tree, 195. Photographer: N.J. Caire. Caire Collection.
From the Pictorial Collection.
ABOVE RIGHT: Washing Day at W.H. Corkhill's 'Marengo', n.d. Photographer: William Hentry Corkhill. Tilba Tilba Photographic Collection.
From the Pictorial Collection.

If the National Library's current plans to digitise key parts of its collections are more modest in scale than those currently being funded in the United States by a beneficent Congress in partnership with enlightened private sponsorship programs, they point the way to a revolutionary change in accessibility and use which is nothing short of inspirational. Pam Gatenby, Director of the Library's Reader Services Branch which includes important special collections responsibilities such as the Pictorial and Manuscript Sections, looks on recent developments in information technology as a great opportunity for the National Library to open up its collections and to make them truly national. An enthusiastic advocate of the benefits of digitisation, Gatenby believes the Library is in a position to realise a number of strategic objectives and in doing so to offer a better and more effective service to users. Improved access and the reaching out to new audiences is at the heart of the matter, but Gatenby points also to significant preservation advantages flowing from on-line use which will ease the wear and tear on fragile original materials, amongst them some of the most valuable documentary material in the Library's collections.


[Puzzled Kangaroo]

ABOVE: Linley Sambourne The Puzzled Kangaroo c. 1900. wood engraving, hand coloured; 20 x 16.2 cm. From the Pictorial Collection.

The project to digitise a major component of the Library's vast collection of pictorial material relating to Australia clearly gives Pam Gatenby great satisfaction. She speaks enthusiastically of the project nature of the undertaking which saw a group of Library staff members coming together from different collection and service areas to work together as a team to solve issues such as copyright clearance, image quality and the ease of user access. The result, a database of images drawn from the Library's Pictorial Collection, comprises material selected from the major categories of pictures held by the Library: historical paintings, watercolours and drawings dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, portraits and historical and contemporary Australian photography depicting many aspects of Australian life, past and present.


[Project Group]

From Left to Right: Yves Turgeon, Barbara Perry, Pam Gatenby and Diana Dack.

This database is one of the largest and best organised in Australia and its development places the National Library amongst the leaders in the opening up of research collections to wider use. The project has built on a major cataloguing of the collection which has been carried out in recent years and which has seen records for pictorial material added progressively to the national bibliographical database where they have been accessible to users through the National Library's Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN). The new digitisation project has therefore built on previous work which itself represented a major innovation when it was embarked on several years ago.


[J.A. Lyons]

ABOVE: Les Reynolds (1897-1939) Portrait of J.A. Lyons 1927 watercolour; 39.2 x 27.3 cm.
From the Pictorial Collection.

The idea that a cataloguing database developed to provide access to the book holdings of Australian libraries might be used to carry records for a major pictorial archive was scorned by many when the idea was first proposed by the National Library in the mid-1980's following visits to the United States by senior staff members including Jan Fullerton, now Assistant Director-General, Collections and Reader Services and Pictorial Librarian, Barbara Perry. Both staff members had been impressed with the major developments in shared cataloguing systems and recognised the potential to use the Australian network to carry records for unique materials as well as books, a proposal which was to see a significant enrichment of the network service.

The objections to suggestions by the National Library that other institutions might contribute records for their own special materials was not so much on the grounds that a bibliographic database was itself inappropriate but that the lack of a visual record to accompany a description of each picture limited the usefulness of such a catalogue. The National Library view however was that ABN had the potential to provide users outside Canberra with a knowledge of the full range of materials held in its collections and that this represented an important first step in the provision of on-line access. Knowing what was held by the Library could lead a user in, say, Melbourne or Carnarvon to collections which might otherwise have remained unknown and therefore inaccessible. Barbara Perry's sense of the possibilities offered by the new technology had also been stimulated by the video disk products she had seen during a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 1985. Back in Canberra, she and her staff developed a proposal which saw the creation of a video disk containing 12,000 images drawn from the Library's pictorial collections, together with full cataloguing records. But while this product achieved part of what the Library was looking for- it provided subject access to a representative part of the collection, including many of its historically most important works, together with general browseability- its access was limited to those who obtained copies of the disk and had the equipment to use it.


['Lightening' Afire ...]

ABOVE: Terry Callen (b. 1912)
The 'Lightening' Afire in Corio Bay, October 1869 watercolour; 26.2 x 36.8 cm.
From the Pictorial Collection.

The foundation which had been laid in this way has, in the 1990's, delivered a valuable product as the National Library begins to take advantage of the exciting possibilities for the delivery of information now available through the Internet. After a modest start experimenting with the information potential of the World Wide Web, the Library in 1995 launched its own distinctive Web site (www.nla.gov.au). The National Library's Home Page provides a comprehensive introduction to the Library's collections and services. Maintained by a Server team led by Diana Dack (Director, Systems Projects) the site offers current information about the Library including details of new services, recent publications, lectures and seminars, new acquisitions, finding aids to manuscript collections, articles and papers written and presented by staff and details of books and other products available through the National Library Shop.

[Ian Barker QC]

ABOVE: Neville Dawson (b. 1948) Ian Barker QC through My Eyes 1990 acrylic on canvas; 157 x 156.7 cm.
From the Pictorial Collection.

Building on this success, the Library is moving now to use the Web in more adventurous and creative ways to deliver access not merely to information about its collections and services and its wider cultural programs, but to provide direct access to its rich collections of historical material. While the costs of digitisation are high and present a major challenge to an institution which houses a vast collection of materials in a range of formats, the Library's current strategy is to work incrementally and to add material in 'bite-size' portions. Working in this way, it has recently created two virtual exhibitions which replicate on the Web exhibitions curated by National Library staff. These draw on unique materials held in the collections and extend to a wider community the benefit of the substantial investment which has been made in recent years in the expansion of the Library's exhibitions program. In a similar way, advantage has been taken of the investment made in the improvement of user access to the pictorial collection. The enhancement of the Library's service potential is enormous. Although the pictorial collection has always been used by researchers, scholars, publishers and curators, the new Web service places a major component of this rich resource within the reach of a new national and international user community. Current marketing of the new service has targeted Australian publishers with the exciting news that images from the Library's collection in Canberra can be researched and selected from the comfort of offices elsewhere in Australia.

Although there is still a long way to go, and in the pictorial collection alone a large body of material still to be digitised before it can be added to the new data base, it is exhilarating to gain some sense of the power now offered by technology to open a window on to materials and services previously only the preserve of the few, that small percentage of the population used to visiting libraries and archives or those able to travel to distant places in order to do so. This democratising of access to collections long held in the public domain but effectively available only to relatively small numbers of people represents one of the great human advances. At the same time, it is consistent with the fundamental principle of librarians and curators that collections are acquired for use and for the enrichment of human knowledge, awareness and understanding.


[Palm Cockatoo]

ABOVE: William T. Cooper (b. 1934) Palm Cockatoo watercolour; 59.5 x 41.5 cm.
From the Pictorial Collection.

Pam Gatenby and her colleagues in the National Library recognise that what has been achieved so far is a small step in the opening up of the collections which reside in institutional custody. But Gatenby stresses the importance of this step and envisages a future which sees the elimination of institutional barriers to access: 'Technology presents us with a challenge in how we think about our custodial and service role. We are keen to work with other cultural institutions to maximise effort and investment and to realise the potential offered by digital technology to break down the barriers which exist between institutions. In future, we see that the collections here at the National Library might be more strongly integrated with others in this country and that there will be major benefits in delivering to Australians greatly improved access to those materials which are part of their culture and heritage.' Diana Dack and her Server team look modestly on their current success, conscious that bigger challenges are ahead: 'We're just at the beginning. So far, we've worked only with a small part of the collection and we've dealt with only one format and that, certainly, the easiest one. The hard part will be to work with manuscripts, maps, text and sound which pose greater problems of translation'. But the Library is on the way, claiming an important stake in a new future for its services and its users.

Visit IMAGES 1 at http://www.nla.gov.au/images1/