ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 63 | June 2003
Visitors from Library of Congress and National Library of Scotland
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| Right to left: Bemal Rajapatirana (Manager, National Bibliographic Database, Kinetica, NLA), Mr Beacher Wiggins (Acting Associate Librarian for Library Services, Library of Congress), Mr Fred Guy (Director of Information Communications Technology, National Library of Scotland), Roxanne Missingham (Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing, NLA), and Robert Walls (Director, Kinetica Database Services, NLA) |
Autumn is a pleasant time to visit the nation’s capital, and two of the international participants in the National Libraries Endeavour Advisory Board meeting in Wellington, New Zealand, continued their travels onward to visit the National Library of Australia.
Mr Beacher Wiggins (Acting Associate Librarian for Library Services, Library of Congress), has been a significant contributor to developments in cataloguing across the world for many years. He has an extraordinary breadth of knowledge and interest, and has worked with many Australian librarians through the Joint Steering Committee (JSC) for Revision of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. The National Library’s Deirdre Kiorgaard (Manager, Special Materials Cataloguing) who will represent Australia on the JSC from September, and the visit provided an opportunity to exchange views on cataloguing in an online world.
Mr Wiggins discussed developments in digital preservation and metadata standards, as well as viewing some of the Library’s recent collaborative initiatives such as MusicAustralia and AskNow!. National Library staff also took the opportunity to discuss the procedures for proposing changes to Australian Library of Congress Subject Headings.
The Library’s second visitor was Mr Fred Guy, Director of Information and Communications Technology for the National Library of Scotland. Of particular interest to Mr Guy were the range of services supported through information technology, and issues of developing new services and staff skills.
Mr Guy has been responsible for the implementation of Endeavor’s Voyager library management system at the National Library of Scotland. The National Library of Australia is currently installing the Voyager system, and benefited from discussions on implementation and future development needs. Mr Guy has also been involved in collaborative projects with Scottish libraries, including those in the higher education sector. Discussions highlighted the need to develop services enabling citizens to access the library and online resources within a country, wherever they are held.
There are many links between Australia and Scotland, and Mr Guy was interested to see photographs in the Library’s Pictures Collection depicting Scottish migration to Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Both Mr Wiggins and Mr Guy provided valuable insights into the challenges facing
libraries as they review current services to make collections more visible through
the Internet.
—Roxanne Missingham, Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing Division
| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |
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