National Library of Australia Annual Report 2000-01
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Information Technology Issues

Digital Services Project

The Digital Services Project is a major undertaking to implement an infrastructure and management framework to support the Library's growing digital collection. In June 2000, the Library released Request for Quotation documents for two major components—the Digital Object Storage System and the Digital Object Management System. This process resulted in the purchase of a suitable system to meet the digital object storage requirements for this project. The Library decided to meet its requirements for a Digital Object Management System through in-house application development. The application will manage the Library's digitisation process and the resulting digital collections. Another component, the PANDORA Document Acquisition System (PANDAS), was developed and implemented in-house.

Group 11 IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Project

The Library participated in Group 11 within the Whole of Government IT Outsourcing Initiative. However, following the release of the Humphry Review of the Whole Of Government IT Outsourcing Initiative in January, the Library informed the Minister that it was withdrawing from the Group 11 process as it considered that the implementation risks would best be addressed by a selective outsourcing process. Subsequently, the Library developed a strategy for selective outsourcing.

The Library's Web Site

In September 2000 the Library issued its Online Action Plan detailing initiatives and strategies for meeting the GovernmentOnline strategy and for the further development of its web-based services. The Library is well positioned in terms of adherence to the standards recommended in GovernmentOnline for metadata, electronic record-keeping and accessibility and is currently focusing its attention on electronic commerce and procurement issues and technologies.

Across the Library, staff are using XML (eXtensible Markup Language) with increasing expertise as a markup, for specifying data requirements and for documenting the organisation's information architecture.

During the year, the Library completed 34 application development projects, of which 10 were major projects. An increasing proportion of application development projects are undertaken within the web environment.

IT Infrastructure Improvements

The Library improved the security and performance of its IT infrastructure through:

the implementation of a centralised, automated monitoring of and reporting on system events, including failures, to improve system availability
an independent review of all aspects of IT security, with emphasis on Internet security
upgrades to the disk storage sub-systems, local area network and Internet link to meet the demands for increased capacity and performance generated by rapidly growing digitisation activities.

Service Availability

During the year the average availability of nine key service areas was as follows:

Service Availability (%)
Local Area Network 99.9
File Services (Microsoft NT Servers) 99.8
Email (Microsoft Exchange) 99.8
Web Services 99.7
Integrated Library Management System 99.5
PANDORA 99.9
Finance One 100.0
Kinetica Document Delivery 99.9
PictureAustralia 99.7

The target availability of 99.5% was met or exceeded for all services.

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