National Library of Australia  - Gateways

ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 73 | February 2005


PictureAustralia Participants’ Meeting a Success

On Monday 8 November the National Library of Australia hosted the Annual PictureAustralia Participants’ Meeting. Currently in its fourth year, the meeting provides a forum for participating PictureAustralia agencies to discuss the issues, challenges and future developments faced by the service.

The meeting was well attended, with around 40 representatives from participating agencies, including most of the state and territory libraries, the National Archives of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, the National Library of New Zealand, Campbelltown City Library, Screensound Australia, City of Sydney Archives, Australian National Maritime Museum, Australian National University, Wollongong City Library, CSIRO, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Queensland and the Department of the Environment and Heritage.

Roxanne Missingham, Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing Division, National Library of Australia and Elise Edmonds, PictureAustralia’s then manager, summarised the main activities and events of the PictureAustralia service in 2004. The list included reference to new PictureAustralia participants and picture trails; marketing and promotion strategies and cooperative arrangements that PictureAustralia has been involved in during 2004. The cooperative arrangements were with Education Network Australia (EdNA Online), the Learning Federation, and Maritime World. Darryl Bennett, Christine Fernon and Gavan McCarthy provided a progress report on the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Project, which will use PictureAustralia as its major illustrating partner.

Reports from a number of participants were presented in the latter part of the morning, including those from the National Library of New Zealand, City of Sydney Archives, PictureQueensland, Australian National University and ScreenSound Australia (which has since reverted to its original name, the National Screen and Sound Archive). Tony Boston, from the National Library of Australia, gave a demonstration in the context of the Kinetica Redevelopment Project on the new Kinetica search interface, Libraries Australia.

After lunch, participants toured the National Library’s pictorial and Digitisation and Imaging Services branches, before contributing to an afternoon discussion on three possible enhancements to the service—website redesign, the establishment of a browse interface, and a centralised image ordering service. The day concluded with a presentation and discussion on copyright issues for images by Derek Whitehead from Swinburne University of Technology.

Overall the day offered participants, old and new, the opportunity to network and talk about their online image collections. The day was also pivotal in encouraging participants to provide suggestions and comments on a number of different areas of the service. Many of these will be incorporated into a bigger and better service in 2005.
Bronwyn Ryan, PictureAustralia

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