19 December 2013 - 12:00
Dr Ayres presented this paper at the 2013 Australian Society of Archivists conference, in response to a request to speak about the impact of technology on archival programs at the National Library of Australia. This paper begins with a social media interaction between a member of the public and a 19th century piece of sheet music, digitised by the National Library and available via multiple digital channels, and traces the complex web of human, policy, investment and technology decisions and actions which made this interaction possible. The paper argues that archival organisations must embrace the cultural, policy and investment changes required to make their collections discoverable through multiple digital channels, moving on from a past in which archivists and librarians could expect users to come to either individual physical reading rooms or organisational websites to meet their research needs.
nd and 3
rd of the Library’s directions. They reflect the Library’s understanding of the current and likely 3 year context in the information and cultural spheres. We expect many more Australians to have access to fast broadband by 2015. We expect that a large proportion or even a majority will be using mobile devices to access content. We expect users to be able to choose from an ever-growing array of online content, and will therefore focus on what we, uniquely, can do, including digitising Australian content, and making freely available digital Australiana more discoverable.
We expect a new Australian Government Cultural Policy to be launched, and that it will extend beyond the performing and creative arts and into the areas of how Australians can access, use and interact with their documentary heritage. We support the Australian Government’s focus on inclusion, especially ensuring that rural and regional Australians have access to the information and opportunities they
In September last year, at the ALIA 2014 conference, I spoke about Trove at 5, and asked ‘are we there yet’, focusing on Trove’s audiences and the work still ahead to extend its reach to a full cross-section of the Australian community. Today I would like to focus on where ‘there’ is, by comparing Trove
to three other cultural aggregators, Europeana
Digital NZ
And Digital Public Library of America
These are the services with which Trove is sometimes compared and with which we have fairly close contact. I think of them as the aggregator siblings. All four aggregate metadata describing content from multiple contributors so that users can discover resources through a single portal, and developers can access resources through a single API platform. All are based on a common value of making it easier for the public to access, enjoy and use the collections of cultural institutions.
Guests: Uncle Dave Williams, Lee-Ann Buckskin, Professor Lisa Jackson-Pulver, Wesley Enoch, Katrina Sedgwick
These pieces of information are useful for finding a known item, where the user is searching for a specific broadcast that they already know exists. For the user searching more broadly by subjects or keywords, like “Indigenous” or “World War One”, they’re not going to find this record. We need to capture more information, so that broader searches will find this record in Trove. Luckily the ABC has included a large number of tags for each segment. These tags aren’t viewable to an ordinary user with their web browser but include additional helpful information – subjects, a brief description of the segment and more – that facilitate better discovery. To create a record for Trove, we capture data from both the elements displayed to users and this hidden data from tags.