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 Searchers have used the service to search the Australian National Bibliographic Database and other sources in a variety of ways:
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:
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:
Scope of activity in Stage 2: 2005
Current Project Status: National Bibliographic Utility
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:
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 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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