Web showcase: Building sustainable web-based services

The web showcase was introduced as a feature of Information Online 1999 to show how information professionals have met the challenge not only of building, supporting and managing web-based services but of sustaining such services into the future. The Web Showcase in the Bayside Room will feature Australian projects addressing various aspects of this challenge, including resource creation, description, discovery and archiving; user interface and support issues; underlying tools and architectures.

In addition to new web-based projects a number of the 1999 Web Showcase projects have been invited back to demonstrate both their continuing development and sustainability.

We encourage you to visit the Web Showcase in the Bayside Room and to check the conference programme for Web Showcase demonstration times and stand locations.

AUSTLIT: The Australian Literature Gateway

Dr Marie-Louise Ayres
Executive manager and manager, Special Collections and Services
Academy Library
Australian Defence Force Academy
Canberra ACT 2600
E-mail: m.ayres@adfa.edu.au.nospam (please remove '.nospam' from address)

The spirit of collaboration is the foundation of AUSTLIT: The Australian Literature Gateway, which will be launched in the first half of 2001, and substantially enhanced over the next three years. An unprecedented partnership between eight major universities and the National Library of Australia will produce an integrated resource discovery service for Australian literature scholars.

The gateway incorporates bibliographic, biographical and full text information and will provide national and international researchers with a single entry point to enhanced scholarly resources on our national literature. By exploiting cutting edge information technology to offer new services and maximising interoperability with other resource discovery services, the Gateway will become a national cultural facility of world class standard. The Information Online 2001 web showcase provides librarians and other information professionals with an opportunity to discuss progress on the project, and to find out about future directions.

The Australian Digital Theses (ADT) Program

The aim of the ADT program is to establish a distributed database of web delivered digitised theses produced by the postgraduate research students at Australian universities. The ideal behind the program is to provide ready access to, and promote Australian research to the international community.

The ADT project (as it was originally called) was funded by an Australian Research Council-Research Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities Scheme grant (1997/1998).

The ADT Program has developed from a prototype involving the initial group of 7 universities into a program which was opened up to all Australian universities on 31st July 2000. The official launch by Prof. Vicki Sara, chair, Australian Research Council was held in Canberra on 16 August 2000 at the CISC (Coalition for Innovation in Scholarly Communications) seminar. The national rollout is being coordinated by the CAUL Executive Office. The ADT group headed by UNSW will be providing initial setup support, including the ADT software free to Australian universities on application to CAUL.

In brief, the ADT Program facilitates the depositing of digital copies of theses and by making these accessible via the web, exposes Australian research information contained in theses to both the national and international communities. Participation by individuals and institutions is voluntary at this early stage, but the long term aim is to move towards a truly comprehensive archive of Australian digital theses. All information about the ADT program is publically available via the official ADT website.

The Australian Pictorial Thesaurus (APT)

Deborah Stumm
Manager, Digital Library Strategy
State Library of New South Wales
Macquarie St
Sydney 2000
Australia

The Australian Pictorial Thesaurus (APT) is a hierarchical thesaurus of 15 000 terms on the web.

The purpose of the APT is to provide

• Australian subject terms for indexing images and other original material collections held in Australian libraries, archives, historical societies and museums.
• a controlled vocabulary for searching across image databases on the internet.

It is intended that the APT will become a national standard for describing pictorial materials. The APT was created from the State Library of New South Wales' PICMAN Topic Thesaurus. It is hosted by the State Library of New South Wales, using software supplied by ADLIB Information Systems of Australia.

The Thesaurus was developed through a joint project sponsored by the Council of Australian State Libraries, the peak body representing state and territory libraries and the National Library throughout Australia, with support from Australian Museums Online (AMOL).

EdNA Online

EdNA Online has developed significantly during the 1999 - 2000 period, expanding its resource collection, tools and online services for the education and training sectors. Particular attention has focused on the development of tools to facilitate interoperability, collection growth and resource discovery. The following tools were developed during this period:

• metadata creation and management tools
• harvesting tool, and
• a pathways prototype.

With a metadata standard in place a suite of tools to manage and create metadata has been developed by the EdNA Higher Education Project. The toolset enables the user to:

• detect and analyse existing metadata for a site
• add metadata to local and remote resources
• save the metadata into the resource or to a separate repository
• save the metadata as .html or .rdf
• simultaneously create or edit common elements in multiple resources
• implement different metadata schemas
• generate a harvest control list for metadata collection.

The EdNA harvesting tool enables the collection of metadata information from stakeholder sites and repositories via a number of methods:

1. embedded metadata through:
   • the creation of a harvest control list; or,
   • the crawl method which operates by systematically indexing and harvesting metadata
2. metadata can be harvested from identified stakeholder repositories deploying the rdf format method

Resource discovery is one of the key foundations of EdNA Online. In order to extend the options for resource discovery and offer users alternative and more flexible ways to access information a pathways project was developed. The EdNA Pathways Prototype tool enables the integration of the traditional functions of search and browse. Main features of this function include:

• dynamic derivation of categories
• helps users formulate and refine their queries
• allows both 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' searching
• pathways can be interactively manipulated
• pathways can be saved and recalled
• search of paths can be refined

HealthInsite

Editorial Team Evidence Based Strategies Section, MDP 50, Department of Health and Aged Care GPO Box 9848 Canberra ACT 2601 e-mail: healthinsite.feedback@health.gov.au.nospam (please remove '.nospam' from address)

HealthInsitewas developed by the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care to meet the needs of a growing number of Australians who use the Internet to find health information. HealthInsite fulfils this task by providing a single gateway to quality health information, with links to some of Australia's most authoritative health organisations and their web sites. These include state and commonwealth government agencies, peak bodies and health providers.

The HealthInsite stand at the Information Online 2001 Web Showcase will show conference participants how HealthInsite provides easy access to health information through its various navigation and search options, how information quality is maintained, how information partners contribute to HealthInsite, and the range of information and services available through the site.

HealthInsite editorial team members will be available to explain all aspects of the site, and to provide demonstrations of its various features.

ILRS

The Australian ILRS (InterLibrary Resource Sharing) Directory is the directory of Australian NUC (National Union Catalogue) symbols and is the prime source for finding a contact for the interlibrary loan sections of Australian libraries and discovering their interlibrary loan charges and policies.

The National Library of Australia has redeveloped the ILRS Directory in order to allow libraries to update their own entries on the Web and to integrate it and share data with the Australian Libraries Gateway (ALG). The new database has been constructed in line with emerging standards for directories so that in the future data may be more readily used by automated interlibrary loan systems and shared with other directory databases. The new ILRS Directory service will be implemented in February 2001.

PictureAustralia

Danielle Freeman
Coordination Support Branch
National Library of Australia
e-mail dfreeman@nla.gov.au.nospam (please remove '.nospam' from address)

PictureAustralia is a free online service hosted by the National Library of Australia that makes it possible to search the combined pictorial collections of leading cultural institutions through a single access point.

At present you can access nearly half a million images from the collections of the State Libraries of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, the Australian War Memorial, the National Archives of Australia, the National Library of Australia and the Fryer Library of the University of Queensland. Other galleries, museums, archives, libraries and universities are expected to join the service in 2001, increasing the collection to a target of over one million images.

The service relies on the Internet for its delivery and has a 'hybrid' architecture with a centralised search index based on Dublin Core metadata and distributed images. Users can search on the cental index for their subject of interest, view 'thumbnail' images in their results, then go to a participating agency's web site to view a larger version of an image.

Social Change Online

Contacts: Linda Rouse,
John Brisbin,
Maurits van der Vlugt,
Brian Goddard
Social Change Online

Social Change Online (SCOL) is one of Australia's leading internet/web technology developers. SCOL helps organisations deliver their content over the web by means of:

• information and web content management from a range of distributed sources, e.g. multiple databases and syndicated content
• portal or gateway site development for peak organisations
• web-based softare application development
• online mapping and geospatial applications.

We have pioneered a range of site management tools for the needs of electronic publishers, be they:

• government departments e.g. NSW DIR
• professional associations e.g. Law Foundation
• superannuation funds e.g. HESTA
• unions e.g. LaborNet
• libraries e.g. MQU Library
• natural resources management and mapping organisations e.g NPWS Australian Wildlife Atlas
• community-based special interest groups e.g. Reach Out!
• and intranets.

We are the leading developer on Australia's team in the international Open GIS Consortium Testbed project as well as for the Australian Web Mapping Consortium. Our reputation is built on our adherence to standards, sustainability and self-publishing principles.

The success of our projects derives from providing our clients with theability to manage content cost effectively, without compromising quality ofpresentation or integrity of the overall information structure.