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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 54| December 2001


New Look Pictures Catalogue

If you are looking for items in the Library’s Pictorial Collection you can now search more easily with the new look Catalogue. On 22 October the Pictures Catalogue was merged with the Images1 database. Now, in a single catalogue, you can see all the catalogue records for Pictorial items and the images of those items that have been digitised.

The Pictures Catalogue is graced by a new graphic design. The home page shows six small images as a taste of the Pictorial Collection. One of them is a portrait by Bryan Kneale of Rex Nan Kivell, whose collection forms the core of the Library’s Collection of paintings and objects.

Frederick Shipman Entreprises Ltd present Annette Kellermann ...

The Pictures Catalogue does more than Images1. It contains links directly from the bibliographic records and images to an order form. If you select the order option, the bibliographic details of the item you have selected will be automatically entered on the order form. No longer will you need to write in accession numbers or any of those other strange numbers that dangle off Pictorial catalogue records.

At present you have to print the order form and fax or mail it to the Pictorial Section, but we are planning to introduce online ordering, with security for your credit card details, next year.

Another new feature of the Pictures Catalogue is the ability to move from a collection-level record, such as ‘Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition, 1997–1998’ to each of the records within the collection, and back again, with a click of the mouse.

Meanwhile the content of the Pictures Catalogue is getting better all the time. In July the Library accelerated its digitisation and Pictorial cataloguing programs. There are now over 30 000 digitised images and these are growing at around 10 000 a year. Some recent additions include the David Elliot Collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century postcards of Australian stage stars, including the wonderfully named Miss Tittell Brune, and Geoff Pryor’s cartoons of Australian life and politics in the 1980s. Soon to be loaded will be thousands of photographs of the Sydney Olympics, forming what we think will be the largest online, publicly accessible photo archive of the Olympics in the world.
—Linda Groom

Above, left: Frederick Shipman Entreprises Ltd present Annette Kellermann 'The Perfect Woman'
and a company of 1000 players in
Neptune's Daughter the film masterpiece of the world [between 1890 ad 1920]
1 postcard: b&w; 12.7 x 8.5 cm.
in David Elliot Theatrical Postcard Collection
nla.pic-an22948275
[found at www.nla.gov.au/nla.pic/an/000/022/948/275/nla.pic-an000022948275-v.jpg]

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

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