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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 47| October 2000


Kinetica Annual Users Meeting, 2000

Over170 Kinetica users joined the Kinetica Advisory Committee and Kinetica staff in Melbourne in late August. Steve O’Connor, CEO of CAVAL, was the chair for this year’s Kinetica Annual Users Meeting. This year, there was discussion of a range of strategic issues relating to the ongoing development of the National Bibliographic Database (NBD) as well as the practical operation of the Kinetica service.

In addition to presentations by National Library staff on operational issues and future developments for Kinetica, presentations were given by a number of users, describing their experiences with Kinetica and reporting on the work of the expert advisory groups during the first year of Kinetica’s operation. Presenters included:

Steve O'Connor

Steve O'Connor, Meeting Chairman

Andrew Wells
  • Christine Cother, University of South Australia: KDD (and National Resource Sharing Working Group )
  • Glenys Oxlee, Macquarie University: Expert Advisory Group on Access to Electronic Resources Report
  • Magdalen Lee, University of Sydney: CJK System Users Presentation
  • Roxanne Missingham, Australian Collections & Reader Services, National Library: Reference and End-User Access EAG Report
  • Marian Bate: Report on survey of CAUL members provision of end-user access to Kinetica
  • La Trobe University End-user surveyPreliminary Report
  • Margaret Waller, Yarra-Melbourne Regional Library Corporation: Issues from State User Groups
  • Patricia Scott, University of Adelaide: Cooperative cataloguing in Australia
  • Susan Liepa, Murraylink Consortium: Small libraries/consortia use of Kinetica.

Andrew Wells,Assistant Director-General Resource Sharing

Helen Livingston, Acting University Librarian, Deakin University and chair of the Kinetica Advisory Committee, summarised the key outcomes of the meeting. These are listed below:

National Bibliographic Database

  • The NBD remains the key source of bibliographic records and locations for Australian library collections.
  • Data within the NBD must continue to be of good quality, comprehensive and current in order to maintain the value of the database.
  • While acknowledging the issues some libraries have had in batch loading to Kinetica, non-contributors and slow contributors were encouraged to participate in the overall interest of all Australian libraries.
Conference registration

Registration for conference-attendees

Funding of the Kinetica service

  • Recent growth in use of the Kinetica service is encouraging.
  • Libraries now have the option to catalogue on their local systems, and many have chosen to do so. As a result, there has been a decline of about 20 per cent in original online cataloguing in the first year of operation of the Kinetica service. This has led to a shortfall in revenue for 1999–2000 of approximately $1m. As the National Library is required to run Kinetica as a cost-recovered service, a 5 per cent price increase has been proposed to take effect from 1 January 2001.
Kinetica Annual Users meeting

The Kinetica Annual Users Meeting in full swing

The National Library has also taken steps to reduce expenses including suspending the loading of the Blackwells Table of Contents file for the time being.

Application software and telecommunications issues

Software enhancements

  • The National Library reported that all components of the Kinetica service have been upgraded in the last year with many changes the direct result of customer comment. Major changes to Kinetica Web, the Kinetica Client and Kinetica Document Delivery are scheduled for this coming year.

Kinetica Document Delivery

Kinetica Annual Users meeting-170 participants

The meeting in progress with over 170 participants

Since the Annual Users Meeting, the National Library has reported to all customer libraries that it is undertaking the following actions:

An expert advisory group will be formed to build on customer libraries’ experience of using Kinetica and to develop guidelines on workflow. Kinetica staff has commenced investigating the feasibility of adding short records to the NBD via a web interface. This will suit small libraries with limited system resources. We are strongly encouraging our system vendor to consider implementing the Z39.50 extended service to enable libraries to automatically report their holdings to the NBD while working on their local library systems times

Kinetica staff will continue to give high priority to improving response times. Kinetica staff have already assisted in diagnosing the cause of slow response times in a number of customer libraries with the result that many issues affecting performance have been successfully addressed. Client libraries with continuing slow response times via their Internet connections are encouraged to seek analysis of these issues by Kinetica staff. Achievement of satisfactory response times is a shared responsibility between the National Library and each user of Kinetica.

The National Library acknowledges the wide range of user experiences with the Kinetica Client. This year we will pay particular attention to the Client. A first step will be the establishment in November 2000 of a focus group involving practitioners who will provide advice on further improvements. Ergonomic issues will continue to be given high priority in software development.

It has become clear that authority control is not a priority for the majority of Kinetica users, many of whom prefer to manage authorities in their local catalogue. It appears that it is unlikely that Kinetica users will in the future commit to the cost of undertaking authority control work on the NBD to any significant extent. The National Librarys current direction in relation to authority control is:

The management of digital resources offers new opportunities for collaborative action among Australian libraries. This theme emerged at the Annual Users Meeting and the National Library is currently considering its role in this area. It is likely that the overall issue of a national approach to inclusion of digital library resources in the NBD will be a topic for considerable discussion in the future. At this stage there is the provision to add records to the NBD for digital library resources and libraries are encouraged to do so. The National Library has appointed an Expert Advisory Group to provide advice on improving the availability of cataloguing and location information for electronic collections, and reducing maintenance costs in local systems and the NBD. The National Library is also working on the bulk addition of cataloguing records and holdings for electronic data sets held by Kinetica customer libraries, with the addition of the Science Direct records already loaded to the NBD as a pilot project.

Kinetica Annua Users meeting-cjkl

Annual meeting of Australian National Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) Service users in Melbourne on 29 August held in conjunction with the Kinetica AUM. Magdalen Lee of the University of Sydney Library (standing far right) presented a paper on CJK issue to the Kinetica meeting

In coming months, the National Library will review the ongoing need and demand for its resource sharing services. The review will address strategic issues related to the value of and ongoing need for a centralised NBD; it will not address systems support for Kinetica, which is considered to be cost-effective and appropriate in the medium term. The Library proposes to engage a consultant to carry out the proposed review. This review is part of the National Library’s ongoing evaluation of its directions and services. The National Library remains committed to Kinetica as the platform for developing and delivering the NBD, but future directions in support of resource sharing require consideration. This is particularly the case given the fact that some Australian libraries believe that the current NBD is less effective than it was in the past as the contributions of some libraries are nott up-to-date.
—Bryony De La Motte

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