Natoinal Library of Australia - Gateways

Australian Music Centre Wins Kinetica Innovation Award

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John Davis, General Manager, and Judith Forster, Music Resources Manager, Australian Music Centre, with Jan Fullerton, Director-General of the National Library of Australia
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The Australian Music Centre was given the Kinetica Innovation Award at the Kinetica Annual Users’ Meeting held in Canberra on 13 August. The award, in its second year, recognises those who have made outstanding use of Kinetica for innovation or improvement to library practice and service.

The Australian Music Centre was established in 1974 to encourage the performance and understanding of music by Australian composers throughout the world. It has an extraordinarily rich collection: over 12 000 printed scores, 1800 sets of performance parts of works by Australian composers, 1200 CDs, 3500 tapes, 130 LPs and a small collection of DATs. Much of the collection is unique unpublished material which underpins music performance and research in Australia. Over the past year, the Music Centre, in partnership with the National Library, has used the new OAI standard to harvest the rich records from the Australian Music Centre’s AdLib catalogue and convert them through MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) into MARC for inclusion in the National Bibliographic Database and MusicAustralia. The project has demonstrated a very innovative use of new technology to significantly improve access to this very special collection by sharing resource descriptions of two major resource-discovery services.

Mr John Arfield, Chair, Kinetica Advisory Committee presented the award noting: ‘This project represents a significant step forward in providing access to a unique collection of national significance. The award recognises the important use of innovative technology in improving access to resources in Australia’.

John Davis, General Manager and Judith Foster, Music Resources Manager, Australian Music Centre, accepted the award and commented ‘The centre’s library catalogue will now be available online to Australian libraries through Kinetica for the very first time. The development was a highly cooperative one with significant technical work required, but the benefits in national access are enormous for our largely unique collection’.

Two highly commended applications were also received. The National Occupational Health and Safety Commission (NOHSC) has, through participation in the Commonwealth Metadata Project, successfully developed record harvesting for its online publications, at the same time ensuring their inclusion in the National Bibliographic Database. After harvesting these AGLS (a Dublin Core-based standard) records are converted through MODS to MARC and then resupplied to the NOHSC for inclusion in their library catalogue. This significantly improves resource discovery.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics Library was also commended for its work with its own Publications Branch—to record URLS for links to the main feature pages of all ABS publications. ABS Library has worked with Kinetica on the development of record sets of titles in the AusStats collection for supply to Australian libraries.
— Fran Wilson, Resource Sharing Division

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