People Australia
Unknown artist
Portrait of Mrs Elizabeth Gould
b&w picture; 17.3 x 12.2 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.pic-vn3799791
The National Library is creating a new service called ‘People Australia’ which will make it easier for the researcher to locate resources and biographical information about a person. The service will also make available profiles of and resources about a wide range of organisations.
Services like Libraries Australia and Picture Australia currently allow researchers to search for printed or electronic resources relating to a particular person or organisation, but often biographical or profile information about them is not easily accessible online. Further, the information a researcher seeks is often located beyond Library collections. People Australia will make available information and a wealth of associated resources about people and organisations from a range of Australian archives, museums and galleries.
People Australia will greatly benefit the researcher by drawing together information from Internet
resources such as the Australian Dictionary
of Biography Online, Australian Science
at Work,
Bright Sparcs, and the recently released Dictionary
of Australian Artists Online. The service
will also access information from a range of Australian collecting institutions. For example
records about Elizabeth Gould, whose ornithological artworks adorn John Gould’s The Birds
of Australia, would bring together a wealth of information including journal articles, newspaper
articles, manuscripts, images, artefacts, books and electronic resources that relate to her and
her work.
The People Australia Project is currently developing the services needed to harvest information from contributors and administer incoming people and organisation records. Later in 2008 the web user interface will be released, which will allow the Australian public to search this wealth of information. For more information about the project please visit www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/peopleaustralia.
Basil Dewhurst
Manager, Resource Discovery Services