ISSN ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 65 | October 2003
New Catalogue, New Website
The web interface to the Library’s catalogue, containing three million records, will have a brand new look from December. This is when the Library will replace the library management system that underpins the current catalogue as well as the Library’s electronic call slips service and all the operations involved in acquiring and organising the collection.
The new catalogue will assist users to ‘find and get’ items in the collection. It will be faster to access and easier to search. The display of search results will include an image of each item if it has been digitised. Users will find it quick and easy to download their search results to their own computer, or to send them in an email message. They will be able to obtain copies of collection items via a convenient link to Copies Direct, a fee-based document delivery service provided by the Library direct to any user.
The new catalogue will form part of a complete restructure of the Library’s website that will address many of the barriers to access identified in previous surveys of usability testing. A simple search box on every page will enable users to search the website and the catalogue simultaneously, and be presented with results in a format that reveals the variety of resources available. Users will also be drawn into the catalogue from a series of ‘find’ pages that focus on what users want to find rather than the tools they need to use to find it.
The implementation of the new library management system has been a very large task for the Library. The Library is committed to maintaining the high quality of the data that is migrated from the old system to the new. Catalogue and holdings data, which is visible to the public, has been the subject of international standards for many years, and has been relatively easy to migrate. However, the data used behind the scenes to manage the Library’s operations is not subject to such advanced standardisation. The migration of this data has involved painstaking conversion from the data structures of the former system to the data structures of the new system. To ensure a good result, the Library has undertaken three complete test loads of its data to the new system, before starting the final load in November.
The Library’s cataloguers are looking forward to cataloguing on Voyager. As
the largest source of quality Australian cataloguing, the Library makes its
cataloguing records available to Kinetica, for re-use in library catalogues
around Australia and across the world. To keep the flow of records up-to-date,
the Library will provide daily updates of its cataloguing records and holdings
to the National Bibliographic Database on Kinetica.
—Judith Pearce and Julia Trainor
| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: mbrooks@nla.gov.au