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37th Annual Report 1996-97
Services to Libraries

Objective

  • To facilitate nationwide access to documents held by libraries and other information providers.

The Networked Services Project

The Director-General described earlier how the Library came to withdraw from the National Document and Information Service (NDIS) project in December 1996. Although coming under many pressures at this time, the Library was strongly aware of the need for prompt action to find a solution to networked national document access.

The Library announced in January that it would go to tender for commercially available software which would enable it to offer a range of networked services to meet customer expectations over the medium term. The Networked Services Project, as it came to be called, was given a high priority in Library planning and resource allocation for the rest of the year.

In February, the Library issued an information paper for the benefit of prospective suppliers of hardware, software and services. This information paper set out in some detail the Library’s objectives, and the capabilities being sought. It stressed the Library’s intent to base its future networked services developments as far as possible on products and services available in the marketplace, and to minimise custom development.

The Library decided in March to stage the procurement process, beginning with a system to replace the core functions of the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN). A Request for Tender was issued on 24 March, and from late May the Library commenced detailed evaluation of tender responses. An Expert Practitioners Group, with its membership drawn from a wide range of users of the present ABN service, was formed to provide advice during the evaluation. At the same time, the Library put in train a high-level review of its overall systems architecture to ensure an enterprise-wide approach to document and data management. The results of this review will form the base for the next stages of procurement of the other networked services capabilities, such as database hosting, digital object serving, metadata serving, and electronic rights management.

In May, the Library commenced a joint procurement process with the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee’s Standing Committee on Information Resources for systems to manage interlibrary loan and document delivery processes in university libraries and the National Library.

Australian Bibliographic Network and Ozline

With the termination of the NDIS project, there was a strong imperative for the Library to maintain customer support for its existing services—ABN and Ozline—which NDIS was meant to replace and extend.

During the year, membership of ABN remained steady at about 1400 libraries (notwithstanding a number of library amalgamations), while online enquiries and cataloguing grew modestly. Online use of the interlibrary loan service and the UnCover document delivery service continued at similar levels to last year.

While the Library is giving priority to replacing the ABN and Ozline systems, it implemented several service improvements. The Australian Interlibrary Resource Sharing Directory, which is a basic tool for interlibrary lending and document supply, was made available online for the first time in December as a free Ozline database with monthly updates. Later in the year it was mounted on the Library’s information server. Using the World Wide Web, the directory data will be linked to information on Australian libraries and access to their catalogues.

The supply of ABN’s most popular product, machine-readable catalogue (MARC) records, continued to experience a trend away from the weekly delivery of tapes and diskettes, to delivery via the Internet. The daily Internet delivery service was upgraded to support up to five daily deliveries. Use of the Ozline service continued at relatively modest levels. Ozline entered the business information subject field with the acquisition of the EDGE database, which covers technical, business and management issues in several major industries.

National Bibliographic Database

The National Bibliographic Database (NBD) experienced stronger growth than expected, passing the milestone of 25 million library holdings. Highlights of the new collections loaded included 700,000 records from the University of Queensland and 27,000 records from Victorian public libraries.

As well as recording the holdings of Australian libraries, the NBD is enriched by the acquisition of cataloguing records from other national bibliographic agencies. Nearly 16,000 records covering the period 1991 to 1995 were loaded from the National Library of Vietnam, and an exchange agreement was negotiated with the National Library of Indonesia. These exchange agreements provide valuable data for the identification and cataloguing of publications. The records loaded from the National Library of Vietnam are tangible evidence of the value of the Library’s ongoing assistance programs to Vietnam in the area of automated cataloguing. Meanwhile, cataloguing data from all major overseas countries is now loaded to the NBD via the Internet, resulting in a much improved turnaround time.

The Library recognises that the future development of the NBD could be affected by a trend in Australian libraries towards the outsourcing of the cataloguing function to commercial firms or library book suppliers. In order to encourage the continued sharing of cataloguing and holdings data, with its economic benefit to all concerned, the Library commenced trials in which major commercial library suppliers add holdings to the NBD on behalf of their customers.

The Library made encouraging progress on a project to replace American subject heading terminology on the NBD with Australian usage. After consultation with the library profession, the project is merging the two major Australian subject lists developed by the Australian Library and Information Association and by the Australian Bibliographic Network respectively. The new Australian subject terms are being progressively implemented on the NBD.

National Chinese, Japanese and Korean Service

In June 1996, the Library implemented the National Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) Service, a database of over half a million records for books and journals in Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts. The database includes the Library’s own catalogue data, Library of Congress records, and bibliographic and holdings data from other Australian libraries. The National CJK Service began as a cooperative venture between the Library and seven Australian university libraries to provide a shared cataloguing and location facility for Australian libraries dealing with materials in Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts. In September 1996, the Library introduced a parallel database using the Pinyin romanisation scheme for Chinese data. The Pinyin database is a unique world resource and is attracting considerable international interest.

During the year, the National CJK Service expanded its membership to 18 participating libraries. A World Wide Web interface was introduced in June 1997, and an extended search facility (incorporating the international standard ‘Z39.50’) is planned to follow. These two improvements will significantly expand access to the service.

The database will also be expanded in the coming year, with the planned addition of over 200,000 Japanese National Diet Library records. The National Library of Korea has also indicated that it is interested in making its data available.

Interlending Services

The Library’s Document Supply Service is the main avenue for access to the Library’s print collections for all off-site clients of the Library. Over 90,000 loans and photocopies were supplied this year, a decrease of 12% on the previous period. The decrease is the continuation of a trend, which we attribute to a range of factors: the increasing availability of alternative sources of supply, such as online commercial databases and CD-ROMs; the Library’s reduced collecting of mainstream overseas-published journals; and the increased specificity of requesting by Australian libraries, due to better quality information available nationally on library holdings.

In response to this trend, the Library introduced the SUPPLY 1 service in May 1996. SUPPLY 1 is a service intended to supplement our own print collections by obtaining articles from libraries, commercial document suppliers and publishers from around the world. SUPPLY 1 has shown a slow but steady growth since its introduction.

The Library informed the Commonwealth Parliament of its intention to charge for the special service provided to Parliament by document supply. The charging has not yet commenced.

The Library took part in an international initiative to achieve fast and reliable electronic document delivery over the Internet. The Joint Electronic Document Delivery Software (JEDDS) project aims to enhance the Ariel software already used by many libraries to scan and transmit images of printed material across the Internet. Stage 1 was successfully completed with our partners in the project: the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, the National Library of New Zealand, the Joint Information Systems Committee (for the United Kingdom’s university sector) and the Research Libraries Group in the United States. As a result of participating in the development, the Library secured the rights to market the product in Australia and (following the National Library of New Zealand’s withdrawal from the project) in New Zealand.

During April and May, the Library held information seminars in Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra to promote the Document Supply Service, SUPPLY 1, and the ABN interlibrary loan subsystem. The seminars were well attended, with a total of 650 participants, and were a valuable opportunity to strengthen contact with our user base.


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