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Processing and describing our collections

Processing

On acquisition, all items in the Library's collection are accessioned and recorded on the Library's Integrated Library Management System (ILMS). The Library currently uses the Voyager system. In addition, for manuscript material Archivist's Toolkit software is used to manage the accessioning and detailed description of the collection and generation of finding aids.

All material is then catalogued according to the Library's Cataloguing policy, with different levels of description employed for various categories of material. Headings for persons, organisations and subjects are created and maintained according to the Library's Authority control policy.

The National and State Libraries (NSLA) are currently investigating methods to streamline the processing of certain categories of material, in particular unique materials which are generally poorly represented in online catalogues, as part of a Re-imagining Library Services Description and Cataloguing Project.

Describing

The Library uses the following standards for cataloguing:

  • Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second edition (AACR2). The National Library has been active in the development, interpretation and implementation of AACR2, and in the development of RDA : Resource Description and Access, the replacement for AACR2.
  • Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in conjunction with the Australian extension to LCSH, which includes additional Australian subject headings and references that have been authorised for use in Libraries Australia. The Library routinely proposes additions and changes to LCSH itself.
  • Specialist theauri. The Library has developed and maintains the APAIS (Australian Public Affairs Information Service) thesaurus used for index records and the Occupations thesaurus which is used for manuscript, oral history and pictures records. The General, Programs & Invitations and Trade thesauri are used in-house to index the National Library's ephemera collection.
  • The Dewey Decimal Classification system is used to add classification numbers in the bibliographic records of most formats of material, with the exception of cartographic materials which use LC classification numbers.
  • MARC21 is used to create records in the Library's ILMS using the Unicode character set. Script is now added to records for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai language materials.
  • The Library is implementing the Encoded Archival Description, which is a standard for encoding archival finding aids, and aims to convert its existing manuscript finding aids to the EAD standard.
  • Material for digitisation is currently managed by an in-house Digital Collections Management system
  • Persistent identifiers are assigned for all items either digitised or archived by the Library

Arrangement

Printed materials are arranged and stored in various sequences in the Library's onsite stack areas or at two offsite storage facilities. Call number prefixes indicate the location and size of these sequences. See the stack directory and call number prefix guide for more details.

Prior to January 2010, most of the monograph and serial collections used Dewey classification based call numbers. In January 2010 the Library ceased using Dewey call numbers for most categories of monographs and moved to using running number call numbers plus a location and size prefix. Note that a Dewey number is still included in the bibliographic record for these items.