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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 53| October 2001


Kinetica: Progress Review

The National Library’s Kinetica service is now two-and-a-half years old. It enables users to find materials in Australian libraries, and libraries to share descriptions of resources and request material for their users. It is widely used by national, State, university, research, public and special libraries. In moving from the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN) to Kinetica the Library chose a service outsourced through contract with IBM GS. This contract continues to 30 December 2003.

At the Kinetica Annual Users Meeting in August 2000, the National Library announced that it would undertake a progress review of Kinetica. This review formed part of the Library’s ongoing program of performance reviews. The results are highly relevant to consideration of the strategic issue of the Library’s future role in national resource sharing services.

The issues examined in the mid-term assessment of Kinetica were:

Kinetica currently offers access to the following databases:

The report notes the following trends:

Future issues identified in the report include:

The full report is now online at www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/progress.html

Kinetica customers played a vital role in influencing the development of the service and contributed to the report through a survey, focus groups and the Kinetica Annual Users meeting. Kinetica customers will continue to actively influence the development of the service through the Kinetica Advisory Committee, State User Group meetings and other advisory mechanisms.
—Roxanne Missingham

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

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