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ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 38 | April 1999


Networking with the library community

PANDORA at the Web Showcase

Regular readers of Gateways will be aware of the work being done by the PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia) Project at the National Library to ensure long term access to Australian online publications. Recently, the project was afforded an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the PANDORA Archive to a wide variety of librarians, potential users, publishers, contributors, and vendors of systems and software.

For the first time at this year's Information Online & On Disc Conference, a new section called the Web Showcase was included in the exhibition area. The Web Showcase featured Australian projects addressing various aspects of the challenge to build, support and manage Web-based services. Aspects addressed included resource creation, description, discovery and archiving; user interface and support issues; and underlying tools and architectures. PANDORA was invited to participate.

Staff from the National Library's Electronic Unit and the PANDORA officer from the State Library of Victoria provided information and demonstrations on demand for the duration of the conference and enjoyed the experience of working together for the first time in the same physical location.

The PANDORA stand was well attended over the three days and enabled project staff to make contact with a wide variety of people. Two of the publishers whose sites are being archived by PANDORA were present and introduced themselves. Librarians representing numerous organisations visited the stand and were interested in the broad range of titles archived and their steadily growing number. (There are currently 180 titles in the Archive.)

During a discussion with a representative from an indexing service, PANDORA staff became aware that indexing services are already finding that cited links to publishers' sites are failing, thus degrading the usefulness of the citations. This has led the National Library to extend the PANDORA selection guidelines to include Australian titles that are indexed by an indexing service anywhere in the world. We will negotiate with indexing services to include in their citation both the permanent name for the archived version of the item and the link to the publisher's site. Currently a PURL (permanent URL) is used as an entry point for a title in the Archive, but ultimately URNs (Uniform Resource Names) will be adopted for this purpose. Therefore, when the link to the publisher's site is no longer available, researchers will still have convenient access to the information they require. Two prominent indexing services have already indicated their willingness to work with the National Library in this way.

The Electronic Unit has established and will continue to maintain a list of titles that are in the PANDORA Archive. This list is available at http://www.nla.gov.au/pandora/archive.html

| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |

Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: lkirwan@nla.gov.au

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