ISSN ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 65 | October 2003
Kinetica’s Commonwealth Government Metadata Pilot
During the past two years, Kinetica has actively pursued the acquisition of metadata or catalogue records for electronic resources that are made available through Australian libraries. During this period the scope has broadened from gathering records that only describe print equivalents such as electronic journals or books, to also including metadata for resources that exist solely in electronic format. In July the National Bibliographic Database (NBD) contained over 340 000 records for electronic resources including government reports, electronic journals and online publications collected for Pandora, Australia’s Internet archive.
A special priority for Kinetica is to ensure that Australians have access to Commonwealth Government publications, especially as these resources are transformed from print to solely electronic publication and distribution. It is estimated that 60 per cent of all Commonwealth Government publications are now published only in electronic format. With this departure from the more traditional print media it is becoming increasingly difficult to find government publications through standard library tools or web search engines. Even where metadata exists for these resources it is not included in library catalogues or resources such as fed.gov.au, which are harvested and indexed by web search engines.
To ensure that the NBD continues to be a reliable and comprehensive resource for accessing both printed and electronic Commonwealth Government publications, Kinetica launched a pilot project in January 2003 to improve access to government documents and to improve the NBD coverage of Commonwealth Government electronic publications.
Kinetica’s Commonwealth Government Metadata Pilot has the following objectives:
The pilot will operate over two to three years in three phases. The key activity for phase one of the pilot (during 2003) is to acquire metadata from a selection of Commonwealth Government agencies for inclusion in the NBD. The first phase will reveal issues in harvesting, converting and loading Commonwealth agency metadata.
This initial phase will also explore workflow options for agencies in the creation and exchange of metadata for their print and electronic government publications. For example, some agencies may elect to input their records online via Kinetica’s cataloguing interface, whereas others will opt to FTP (File Transfer Protocol) metadata files created locally, and others may prefer that metadata is gathered from Harvest Control Lists mounted on their web sites.
Phase one participants are the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries Australia, Environment Australia, Department of Health and Ageing, the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission, Parliamentary Library, and the Treasury.
A workshop to refine the goals of the project, identify major issues and define strategies was held at the National Library in February 2003. The workshop was attended by representatives from each participating agency and Kinetica and the following issues were identified as common to all participants:
Kinetica has collected test data from five of the participating agencies, and are progressing with specifications that will convert the agency metadata from its original AGLS format, to the MODS3 standard (encoded in XML4) and then to MARC bibliographic records that can be added to the NBD. The next challenge will be to automate the harvest, conversion, loading and updating of this metadata on to the NBD. A further goal is to automate the flow of this data to other repositories and in this way expose the metadata to harvest and indexing by web search engines.
The ultimate aim is to enable Australians to discover and link directly to online government resources. Providing good metadata on the NBD is a significant step towards ensuring that people discover the resources they seek no matter where the journey starts.
For further information on the Commonwealth Government Metadata Pilot, please
contact Kinetica Customer Support, email: kinetica@nla.gov.au or phone: 1800
026 155.
—Bemal Rajapatirana and Ian Dunn
1. The AGLS Metadata Standard is a set of 19 descriptive elements which government departments and agencies can use to improve the visibility and accessibility of their services and information over the Internet. It has been mandated for use by Commonwealth Government agencies <www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/gov_online/agls/summary.html>.
2. Dublin Core metadata element set—a standard for cross-domain information resource description <http://www.dublincore.org/>.
3. An XML schema for a bibliographic element set that may be used for a variety of purposes, particularly for library applications <www.loc.gov/standards/mods/>.
4. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). <www.w3.org/XML/Activity.html>.
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