National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 76 | August 2005


SCRF Website Launch
UK
Library Collections for Australian Studies

On Thursday 28 April the National Library of Australia (NLA) hosted the Australian launch of a new web resource, Southern Cross Resource Finder: Australian and New Zealand Collections in the UK (SCRF) [1].  The SCRF was created at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London by Jacquelyn Keys, an NLA staff member on fellowship in the UK during 2004–05. The launch, sponsored by Division 2 of the National Library, was held in the Friends Lounge and around 40 guests attended, including the Library’s Director-General Jan Fullerton, Assistant Directors-General Margy Burn and Roxanne Missingham, Professor Carl Bridge (Director, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, London) and Professor Geoffrey Bolton (Chancellor of Murdoch University and past Director of the Australian Studies Centre in London).

Prof. Bridge introduced the proceedings and was followed by Prof. Bolton, who officially launched the new resource, commenting on its value for facilitating access to library collections in the UK and the wealth of material relating to Australia and New Zealand to be found there.  Jacquelyn followed with acknowledgements and thanks to the organisations and individuals that contributed to making the resource possible, and then performed a live demonstration of using the resource.

Before undertaking the project in London, Jacquelyn was acting project manager for the NLA’s interactive chat reference service, AskNow! She will return to the National Library in late 2005 to take up the position of PictureAustralia manager.

The SCRF project commenced in mid-2004 with the purpose of ‘creat[ing] an electronic resource discovery tool which provides a single entry point for information about resources relating to Australia and New Zealand in the United Kingdom’. This electronic tool is ‘based on Valerie Bloomfield’s printed guide [2], and will support research, learning and teaching about Australia and New Zealand’.

The initial stages of the project involved research into appropriate advisory groups in the UK, and a survey of academics and librarians. Key findings from the survey (and a related focus group) established the desirability of a freely available online resource with keyword and subject access, which describes relevant collections held in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in a consistent manner and provides links to websites and catalogues.

The identified advisory group Collection Description Focus [3], operating under the banner of UKOLN [4] and with a mandate to support projects actively involved in collection description work, was of great assistance to the SCRF. The project benefited not only from guidance and information provided by Anne Chapman (UKOLN) and Alison Baud (University of Bath Library), but was also granted permission to reuse an open source software database designed for a cooperative project between UKOLN and the University of Bath Library (‘Tap into Bath’) [5]

The SCRF project also benefited from the services of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, which provided hosting and customisation.

Simultaneously, the process of contacting libraries, museums and archives in the UK and updating and creating entries was underway and Jacquelyn made visits to many libraries in London and also in Cambridge and Oxford.

All of the project aims were achieved during the nine months of the project. The resource now holds some 150 entries, each containing a detailed description of the collection, links to the library website and email contacts, information about catalogues, and other details such as the history of the collection and collection strengths. Jacquelyn is currently working on extending the resource to include collections from the Republic of Ireland.

The SCRF website is a freely available Internet resource, searchable at the following web address: <http://www.scrf.org.uk/>. It has been included in the National Library’s ‘Indexes and Databases’ <www.nla.gov.au/pathways/jnls/newsite/view/1393.html> and should prove a useful tool for researchers at the National Library.

—JACQUELYN KEYS
SCRF Project Manager
Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College, London
Website: <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/menzies/index.html>
E-mail: jacki.keys@kcl.ac.uk

References

  1. Southern Cross Resource Finder: Australian and New Zealand Collections in the UK<http://www.scrf.org.uk/>
  2. Bloomfield, V., 1986, Resources for Australian and New Zealand Studies, Australian Studies Centre and British Library, London.
  3. Collection Description Focus <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/>
  4. UKOLN <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/> UKOLN is funded by MLA (the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath, where it is based.
  5. Tap into Bath <http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/tapintobath/>

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