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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 47| October 2000
Australia in the picture
National Library Director-General, Jan Fullerton launches the PictureAustralia Service
After two years in gestation, the new PictureAustralia service was formally launched on 4 September at the National Library by the Minister for Veterans Affairs, the Honourable Bruce Scott. Beginning as an idea between the State Library of New South Wales and the National Library, a few prototypes were tested and extra collaborators were identified during the two-year timeframe.
The National Library was very pleased to work with the State Libraries of Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales and the Australian War Memorial to bring the service to fruition. Two new collaborators, the National Archives and the University of Queensland, joined the service just prior to launch, making PictureAustralia a truly cross-cultural service. The service links to the digitised image collections of each of the image providers in real time.
The PictureAustralia service was suggested to fulfil a need for Australians to be able to discover heritage images on the Web without needing to know where they are actually physically located. This means that a school student doing a project, a local historian documenting their home town, or a researcher looking for works of art by a particular artist can find the images they seek by starting in this single location. Access is available to every Australian free of charge, whether they are at home, in their local library, museum, archive or gallery, or at their place of work.
PictureAustralia has been designed to be easy to use, so that it is available to all Australians in regional and remote areas who have Web access. Our national heritage in images has been unlocked from collections which may be difficult to visit in person. PictureAustralia currently contains half a million image records.
The National Library, on behalf of the collaborators, will be approaching many museums, galleries, archives, universities, public libraries and historical societies over the coming months, to tap into their significant cultural heritage images.
PictureAustralia is available for your use at
www.pictureaustralia.org.
Debbie Campbell
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Right: Debbie
Campbell, Manager of Infrastructure Services instructs the Minister
for Veterans Affairs, |
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Erica Ryan demonstrates PictureAustralia at the launch of the new online service |
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: gateways@nla.gov.au