Judith Pearce Retires
(L-R) Mr Gary Nairn, former Federal Member
for Eden-Monaro, with Judith Pearce and the National Library's Director-General, Ms Jan Fullerton,
at the Public Service Medal awards dinner, July 2007
Photo courtesy the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet
The National Library says farewell to Dr Judith Pearce PSM, well known in the Australian and international library community for her work on online library services and interoperability standards.
Judith started at the Library in 1974 with a BSc from the University of Western Australia and a Graduate Diploma in Librarianship from the Western Australian Institute of Technology. As a science graduate, she was placed in the MEDLARS section, where she trained as an indexer and search analyst and later helped to implement the Australian MEDLINE Service.
In 1979 she went back to university and did a second degree at the Australian National University, in arts this time. This was followed by an Honours year and a PhD in medieval manuscript illumination, for which she shared the university’s J.G. Crawford medal. (Judith’s Honours thesis was on MS 1097/9, a fifteenth-century Flemish book of hours in the Library’s Clifford Collection.)
She then worked for five years at Defence Information Services before returning to the National Library in 1991 as a business analyst for the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN) and for the ambitious National Document and Information Service (NDIS).
Although NDIS failed to achieve its objectives, Judith has strived to achieve its vision of a national discovery service ever since. For the last 10 years she has been instrumental in developing the Library’s digital library services. She has taken the Library’s website through several upgrades, written information papers, business proposals, scope statements and requirements specifications for a number of major systems and services and seen many of them through to implementation.
Deploying standards to achieve interoperability is one of Judith’s enduring interests. She has been an active member of the Standards Australia IT-19 committee and led the development of an international standard, ISO 2146: Information and Documentation – Registry Services for Libraries and Related Organisations.
In June 2007 Judith was awarded a Public Service Medal for outstanding public service in the development and delivery of online library services.
Judith will not be resting on her laurels in retirement. She and her husband David are taking their long-term interest in Australian pottery to the next level by setting up a gallery in Bemboka at the foot of Brown Mountain on the way from Canberra to the New South Wales South Coast. Over the next 10 years she plans to give an increasing web presence to Australian potters and their marks and has started this process already by setting up a blog at http://australianpottery.wordpress.com.