National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 68 | April 2004


Australian Government Agencies Publications Access Seminar: Challenges and Developments

Speakers: Tom Stoddart (Team Leader, Library & information Services, National Occupational Health and Safety Commission); Roslyn Hay (Web Manager, Department of Health and Ageing)

Speakers: Tom Stoddart (Team Leader, Library & information Services, National Occupational Health and Safety Commission); Roslyn Hay (Web Manager, Department of Health and Ageing)

On Friday 19 March, over 100 people gathered in the Theatre at the National Library to attend a seminar sponsored by the NLA, the National Archives of Australia and the National Office for the Information Economy on Australian government publications.  The event proved stimulating and provided an opportunity to look at how metadata can be used to enable better access to government publications.

Roxanne Missingham, Margaret Kennedy, Margaret Phillips and Ian Dunn (all of the National Library) outlined change in government publishing, results of a project to improve access to Australian government publications through increasing the coverage of electronic publications in the National Bibliographic Database and other services such as Recent Australian Publications, library catalogues and portals.

The project is part of the electronic service initiatives of the Library to break down the barriers to finding government publications, whether in print or online. In 2003, approximately 6000 new Australian government publication titles were recorded, of which almost 50 per cent were online publications.

For Australians seeking to find government publications they need a service which lets them search easily (whether the publication is online or in print), and they need to be able to access the publication at any time. Pandora is the Library’s online digital archive which has collected selected online government publications for eight years, storing them and making them accessible. Margaret Phillips (Director, Digital Archiving)  commented:  ‘The more cooperation and assistance we have from government publishers, the more government information we will be able to preserve for posterity.’

Adrian Cunningham (Assistant Director-General (a/g), Government Recordkeeping, National Archives of Australia) discussed the standard for describing government information—AGLS (Australian Government Locator Service).  AGLS improves the visibility and accessibility of government information and services through the standardisation of web-based descriptions, enables web-based search engines to do their job with greater precision and efficiency, and helps ensure that those searching the web are presented with relevant and meaningful ‘hits’ in response to search requests. AGLS has evolved significantly since its birth in 1998 and will keep changing to address: search engine capabilities; quality assurance and self-assessment; integration of metadata creation and management with business processes and business systems; securing/maintaining whole-of-jurisdiction support for metadata deployment; and demonstrating the business case for investing in metadata and distributed harvesting options.

Petra Himbert (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry); Adrian Cunningham (Assistant Director-General (a/g), Government Recordkeeping, National Archives of Australia); Roxanne Missingham (National Library of Australia) and Roslyn Hay (Web Manager, Department of Health and Ageing)
Petra Himbert (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry); Adrian Cunningham (Assistant Director-General (a/g), Government Recordkeeping, National Archives of Australia); Roxanne Missingham (National Library of Australia) and Roslyn Hay (Web Manager, Department of Health and Ageing)

The newest developments in web services are Content management systems. Tom Stoddart (Team Leader—Library & Information Services, National Occupational Health and Safety Commission (NOHSC)) gave an overview of implementation of a content management system.  NOHSC is a regular producer of publications, almost exclusively in electronic form, and has a role in disseminating and coordinating the activities and associated publications of members. The focus in the use of metadata to date has largely been on providing resources and improving discoverability between these organisations and the public.

Tom noted many lessons learnt from the project, including developments required to improve discoverability, capture metadata, utilise the Australian OHS Thesaurus and structural improvements.  Tom noted the importance of making records available so that Australians searching for information through many pathways, particularly those from the National Library’s resource discovery services, can find NOHSC publications.

Petra Himbert (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) described the evolution of the Department’s web services. Petra described the complete loss of metadata with the implementation of the Web Content Management System and the approach taken to develop specifications for a completely new approach to metadata creation and storage. 

She discussed the importance of use of good subject terms through subject-specific thesauri. Good subject terms are essential for successful retrieval. The agriculture portal and departmental websites use a specialist agriculture thesaurus.  She also suggested that alternative scenarios should be considered, based on efficiencies through sharing of records and potentially new metadata repository architectures for the whole of government.

Roslyn Hay (Web Manager, Department of Health and Ageing) described the allocation of metadata for the department’s website of an innovative health information access service—HealthInsite. Using the Health and Ageing thesaurus and records created by divisional web managers, records are shared across a number of service access points. She noted that critical issues for the future include the constant problem of keeping metadata and lists up to date, changing standards, disparity between requirements of different bodies (e.g. HealthInsite and NOIE and NLA) and a move to Content Management System.

Colin Thomas (National Office for the Information Economy) noted that NOIE closed the chain of Commonwealth Government Bookshops in 2003, as the bookshops have experienced significantly declining use and were carrying 20 per cent of (hard copy) government publications. The Australian Government Publications Register was launched to provide access to information about availability of publications that were sold through the Bookshop Network and links to agency website “Publications Pages”.  Other developments are planned.

‘The ability to access Australian government publications, whether print or online, simply and easily through the web can be achieved only if quality records are available and shared with resource discovery services such as library catalogues and the National Bibliographic Database’, said Roxanne Missingham, Assistant Director General, Resource Sharing, National Library.

Presentations from the seminar and a full report are available at <www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/metadata_program.html>.

Further information, contact Roxanne Missingham, rmissing@nla.gov.au

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