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The new-look Picture Australia homepage

The Advanced Search screen has been simplified and now resembles Google's

Look Out for the Refreshed Picture Australia

Over the last 18 months there has been an enormous growth in Picture Australia’s power and intensity. As a digital resource discovery tool, it now presents over 1.3 million photographs, artworks, artefacts, prints, maps and cartoons. These images are drawn from 49 agencies across the cultural sector, including libraries, museums, archives and galleries in Australia and overseas, and all are committed to the shared vision of providing one access point for the dissemination of Australia’s visual history.

Picture Australia’s auspicious seventh year has brought refreshed design and functionality to the site to keep pace with the service’s strong growth. Over the last year a cross-discipline design team in the Library has worked to distil ideas from our participating agency members, Picture Australia researchers, and a Web Expert Usability report by Nielsen Net Rating commissioned in 2006. Recommendations to improve the service included clearer navigation, relevance ranking of search results, and favourite functions. The redesign has factored in all this consultation, plus rigorous research on what our researchers do and don’t do on the site.

Home Page

The key objectives for the redesigned home page were to:

  • focus on the most important function of the site, the search box, by increasing its size and placing it centrally
  • juxtapose historical images from our participating agencies with contemporary images from our Flickr groups. All these images dynamically refresh with every search, displaying the wealth of visual material to be penetrated
  • place commonly used functions in the top navigational toolbar and more general information in the bottom banner
  • minimise text, in line with the focus on pictorial material
  • improve the display of search results.

The iconic vibrant ochre-orange and signature logo of the original site have been left intact to continue to transmit their significant references about the Australian consciousness.

Displaying Search Results

Researchers will be pleased to discover that their search results are now relevance ranked with an exact word or phrase match in the title, making it much quicker and easier to sort through records. Regular researchers will note the cleanliness of the display of records and the option to change the number of records displayed on the Advanced Search page from 12 to 60 images at a time.

Easier navigation is aided by the introduction of icons to indicate functions such as ‘add to favourites’, ‘download favourite records’ save icon and ‘request a copy’ copy icon that give users a quick link to the appropriate action.

Advanced Searching

The simpler language on the redesigned Advanced Search page makes it easier for users to search the database. From statistical research, we found that researchers performed an advanced search like a simple search—by putting one or two terms into the first search box and clicking ‘go’, making little use of the search limits. Boolean terms and search limits are now described in user-friendly terms similar to Google’s Advanced Search. Since approximately 50 per cent of users are now directed to Picture Australia from Google, it made sense to make this adaptation. A search tab in the top navigation banner provides a way to combine a simple search with an agency drop-down menu to facilitate quick searches of individual collections.

Other Improvements

Picture Australia’s strongest research interest comes from librarians, local and family historians, and teachers and students from primary school to university. A new Research Tips page provides information for genealogists on family history research, while teachers and students will also find activities that build research and observation skills. University students can now develop illustration lists using Picture Australia through the bibliographic software Endnote X (http://www.endnote.com/enhome.asp) by downloading the connection file via FTP from the Endnote web site (ftp://support.isiresearchsoft.com/pub/pc/connections/PictureAustralia.enz). Picture Australia also now supports Open Search, which means that you can search from a search box through A9.com, or through your browser if you’re using the latest versions of Firefox or Internet Explorer.

A new Request a Copy service has made accessing our visual history even easier, and many of our participating collections have reported increased revenue from their reproduction services as a result.

Flickr Growth

Picture Australia’s Flickr project is another key innovation, which has enabled individuals to contribute their own contemporary images to the site. Flickr continues to meet and exceed its two key objectives: to increase the number of contemporary images in Picture Australia, and to engage with new audiences. Launched in January 2006, it now forms a collection of over 23 000 images, and visitation to Picture Australia over this time has increased by 43 per cent. This huge spike in usage has been mirrored by an increase in national and international interest in the National Library as a leader in using new social networking tools to create connections between private individuals and their public collections.

This assembling of the public’s historical images with the contemporary Flickr images has made only more evident the unprecedented growth in image culture that began in the last half of the twentieth century. As Jeffrey Skoller observes in Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005):

In this sense, photography, film and television have become the major ways in which we contextualize the past in relation to the present.

This growth of reliance on the visual has had the dual functions of both supporting and unsettling traditional forms of historiography. The value to researchers of viewing both past and present images simultaneously cannot be underestimated in drawing conclusions about the impact of time, continuity and change on our shared visual culture.

We are keen to hear your thoughts on Picture Australia’s new look and feel. Please give us your feedback, and wish Picture Australia another seven years of promising growth.

Fiona Hooton
Manager, Picture Australia

Acknowledgments: The Picture Australia home page includes A friend gives Miss Clarice Faravoni a hand to welcome her fiancé LAC Ken C. Fisher on arrival at Princes Pier on the Athlone Castle, c.1946, H99.201/1425, reproduced courtesy of the State Library of Victoria; Trip the Light, reproduced courtesy of Stephen Kinna; Pinnacles-5, reproduced courtesy of Dale Neill; petrol stop minilya , reproduced courtesy of Emma Snow.