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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 51| June 2001
The Australian National Chinese Japanese Korean (CJK) Service Review
The Australian National CJK Service is a unique resource for accessing Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) materials held in Australian libraries. Launched in 1996, it is Australias largest online network of CJK bibliographic and location data. The database is a world first as the single largest repository of Pinyin Romanised records.
The Service has 22 member libraries within Australia. The majority of the members are academic libraries with significant CJK collections, which are recorded in the centralised database in order to facilitate resource sharing. Users can search and locate CJK materials held in any one of these libraries and more importantly, they can search using either romanisation or CJK characters. Prior to the CJK Service, the only way to search for CJK materials was using romanisation.
The CJK database underpinning the service is a part of the National Bibliographic Database (NBD), but runs on a separate Innopac integrated library system platform in order to store and fully utilise CJK characters using the East Asian Character Code set.
The Library initiated a review of the CJK Service in July 2000 to assess the level of satisfaction with the CJK Service and to review the business and technical environment in which the service operated to develop and improve the Service. A consultant was engaged to conduct an independent assessment of stakeholder satisfaction.
The Evaluation of Stakeholder Satisfaction with the Australian National Chinese Japanese Korean (CJK) Service revealed that 95 per cent of stakeholders were satisfied with the CJK Service and there was 100 per cent satisfaction with the CJK Help Desk services. Ninety per cent of stakeholders also thought the Service represented value for money. The survey of end users demonstrated a need to actively promote the CJK Service to users. Only one third of the academic libraries offered end user access. Seventy-three per cent of the end users surveyed were satisfied with the outcomes of their searches and
27 per cent were partially satisfied. Improvements suggested by end users included increased database coverage for earlier imprints or ancient texts, access to additional databases and interface enhancements for easier input of vernacular script.
The review of the business and technical environment covered issues including CJK character software support, data and encoding standards, data quality and resources, integration with Kinetica services and support for interlibrary document delivery. The review also addressed the recommendations arising from the CJK Users paper presented at last years Kinetica Annual Users Meeting.
A key recommendation arising from the review was that the National Library should aim to deliver an integrated NBD with records in both Romanised and vernacular script in the one database. This supports the recommendation made by CJK libraries at the last CJK Annual Users Meeting.
To achieve integration the National Library will continue to seek implementation of Unicode (ISO 10646) as a high priority in the development of the AMICUS software, which currently underpins the NBD. In the interim the CJK Service will continue to be delivered from the Innopac system.
A number of recommendations were made to deliver improved services and greater efficiencies to CJK libraries including:
CJK libraries will also notice some minor changes to CJK Help Desk services. In order to broaden the base of support for CJK operations within the National Librarys Resource Sharing Division the CJK and Kinetica Help Desk Services will be integrated. All Kinetica staff will be trained for basic CJK inquiries, however specialist assistance requiring expert knowledge of CJK languages, standards or system will still be available via the CJK Service team.
Charges levied for CJK use will continue to be subject to regular review, in line with other Kinetica charges. Contributions to the CJK database in batch mode will also attract the Kinetica Batch*Link fee. These changes reflect the Librarys user charging policy, noting that funding options for the NBD will be a key component of the forthcoming Kinetica Review.
The final report of the Australian National CJK Service Review is
available from the National Librarys CJK Service web pages at
http://cjk.nla.gov.au/.
Bemal Rajapatirana
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au