National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 75 | June 2005


Progress Report on the Kinetica Redevelopment Project

The Kinetica Redevelopment Project has been underway for over 16 months. It reached a major milestone in December 2004 with the completion of Stage 1 of the project.

Libraries Australia
Libraries Australia was launched on 8 December 2004. The service offers a range of new functionality including an improved search screen, alerts, and enhanced requesting options. Usage of the service indicates a fairly quick uptake of the new Google-style search screen.

Searchers have used the service to search the Australian National Bibliographic Database and other sources in a variety of ways:

Libraries Australia searching to 16  February 2005 chart

Libraries Australia: use of limit boxes chart

Browsing has also been popular—7345 browse requests were recorded during the period, almost four times as much use as command searching.

Referrals from the links on the Libraries Australia homepage to pages on the Library’s website has been significant.  In the period 8 December – 31 January referral numbers were as follows:

Find a library 
Search the Internet 
Ask a librarian
Australian literature
Australian law
Australian history
Australian family history
Australian science and technology
Recent publications  
1087
516
344
342
281
 352
438
250
414

Presentations on Libraries Australia have been made to Kinetica State User Groups, staff in a number of university libraries and all state libraries, library users in selected institutions and at the Online Conference. Feedback from library staff has been quite positive and usage generally has been high for the period December to March.

All libraries have been asked for input of enhancement suggestions. So far about 15 libraries have suggested areas for enhancement. Following some minor releases to fix bugs, a more significant release (1.07) was delivered on 3 March. This release contained 12 fixes or enhancements, including:

  • Adddition of limit 'not in my library' to advance search screen
  • Ability to set default databases and search screens
  • Fix for non display of saved records in Saved Records screen
  • ALG, ILRS, CISTI, Infotrieve, online bookshops and printer-friendly versions of records open in new window.

Scope of activity in Stage 2: 2005
The following objectives for Stage 2 have been identified and planned:

  • Implementation of the new National Bibliographic Utility (CBS)
  • Development of a new Record Loading Service which will redevelop the BatchLink and Harvester software to integrate with CBS
  • Redevelopment of the simple web cataloguing form
  • Extension of Libraries Australia and the Customer Management System to deliver all of the products needed to replace the current suite of Kinetica products (including MARCLink)
  • Modification of Libraries Australia and the Customer Management System to interface them with CBS
  • Extension of Libraries Australia to deliver ‘logical views’, such as resource sharing community views
  • Extension of Libraries Australia to allow user ‘personalisation’ of the interface, including a personal area to save records, queries and alerts, and specify defaults for search screens, databases and search indexes
  • Investigation of use of relevance ranking of result sets in Libraries Australia
  • Delivery of three new releases of Libraries Australia (to deliver identified enhancements) between March and June 2005
  • Extension of the Customer Management System to allow customer libraries to update their own data and to support integration with the Australian Libraries Gateway and ILRS Directory
  • Extension of the Customer Management System to support delivery of usage and billing reports
  • Investigation of the potential use of CBS to assist with the incorporation of FRBR search result presentation in Libraries Australia
  • Investigation of ‘federated authentication’, commencing with implementation of a test Shibboleth server.

Current Project Status: National Bibliographic Utility
The OCLC PICA CBS software was installed at the Library in late January, and an intensive series of training courses commenced on 7 February. The following tasks have been completed:

  • Configuration of the database and indexes to support the requirements of the Kinetica service
  • Test load of the update database

The software extensions required from OCLC PICA are well underway. These are expected in the next quarter and will be extensively tested by Library staff.

Working more closely with the software has enabled NLA staff to identify in detail features that will be of benefit to Australian libraries using the cataloguing client. Some features which will be of interest to users are:

  • The ability to import records direct to the NBU records from any of its Z39.50 target
  • The ability to script specific cataloguing functions
  • The ability to copy and paste a full record from another source and have the result recognised as MARC
  • The font size can be configured by each user
  • The software is fully Unicode compliant

National Library staff will be working this year to configure the software, in particular to develop cataloguing templates for different material formats and configure search screens.

The high level acceptance test plan for the NBU Sub-project has been completed and accepted by OCLC PICA and the Library. It will be augmented with detailed test scripts during the coming months.

Current Project status: Customer Management System
A substantial program of work will be required to develop the second stage of the Customer Management System in 2005. Specifications for this development, based on the Stage 2 Scope Statement, are currently being prepared. It is expected that the specification phase will continue through the next four months with development commencing as sections of the specifications are completed.

Work has already started on the architecture of some key components of the Customer Management System. This includes the Access Management Module, which provides authentication and authorisation services to other Kinetica applications, such as Libraries Australia. The Access Management Module is currently being extended and refined to provide a framework to build other core services for Kinetica applications. This includes greater access to, and update facilities for, customer and service data.

Another component currently being designed is the Reporting Data Collector. This will be responsible for gathering log data from all Kinetica systems and loading it into the reporting database. The favoured design involves using message queue technology (specifically, Java Message Service) to provide robust and scalable communications, and a lightweight adaptor to plug into existing logging modules.

Work has also commenced on the design of the customer administration interface. This interface will provide customers with the ability to manage their account details, preferences and access profiles, and to view their usage reports.

Regular reports on progress will continue to be provided through 2005. A major report and presentation of the cataloguing software will be given at the Kinetica Annual User Meeting in Perth on 22 September 2005.

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