Overview of content related to 'archives' http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/taxonomy/term/89/all?article-type=&term=&organisation=&project=&author=rose%20holley&issue= RSS feed with Ariadne content related to specified tag en Trove: Innovation in Access to Information in Australia http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/holley <div class="field field-type-text field-field-teaser-article"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> <p><a href="/issue64/holley#author1">Rose Holley</a> describes a major development in the Australian national digital information infrastructure.</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>In late 2009 the National Library of Australia released version 1 of Trove [<a href="#1">1</a>] to the public. Trove is a free search engine. It searches across a large aggregation of Australian content. The treasure is over 90 million items from over 1000 libraries, museums, archives and other organisations which can be found at the click of a button. Finding information just got easier for many Australians. Exploring a wealth of resources and digital content like never before, including full-text books, journals and newspaper articles, images, music, sound, video, maps, Web sites, diaries, letters, archives, people and organisations has been an exciting adventure for users and the service has been heavily used. Finding and retrieving instantly information in context; interacting with content and social engagement are core features of the service. This article describes Trove features, usage, content building, and its applications for contributors and users in the national context.</p> <h2 id="Opportunities_for_Libraries">Opportunities for Libraries</h2> <p>I see tremendous opportunities for libraries this year because of advances in technology. The changes in technology mean that anyone can create, describe or recommend content, which means that many people and organisations are becoming librarians or libraries in their own way. Librarians should not be threatened or dismayed by this but rather encouraged, since it means that society is retaining its ongoing interest in the creation, organisation and dissemination of content, and we have an integral role to play in these developments. Libraries and librarians are relevant more than ever in this environment because we have vast amounts of data and information to share, a huge amount of information expertise, and an understanding of how technology can assist us in making information more accessible.</p> <p>We need to have new ideas and re-examine our old ideas to see how technology can help us. What things have we always wanted to do that we couldn't before, like providing a single point of access to all Australian information? Is this still pie in the sky or can we now achieve it? Libraries need to think big. As Charles Leadbeater would say 'Libraries need to think they are leading a mass movement, not just serving a clientele.' [<a href="#2">2</a>] Librarians are often thought of as gatekeepers with the emphasis being on closed access, but technology enables gatekeepers to open doors as well as close them and this is the opportunity I see. However many institutions will need to change their strategic thinking from control/shut to free/open before they can make this transition, and take a large dose of courage as well. The American author Harriet Rubin says, 'Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.' [<a href="#3">3</a>] The National Library of Australia already took this step forward in 2008 with the advent of the Australian Newspapers beta service, which opened up the raw text of digitised Australian newspapers to the public for improvement, without moderation on a mass scale [<a href="#4">4</a>]. With a long history of collaboration across the Australian cultural heritage sector [<a href="#5">5</a>] with regard to digitisation, storage, and service delivery, the National Library of Australia is well placed to take the lead with innovation in access to information.</p> <p>Some people may say, 'But isn't Google doing that, so why do we still need libraries?' There is no question in my mind that libraries are fundamentally different from Google and other similar services. Libraries are different to Google for these reasons: they commit to provide long-term preservation, curation and access to their content; they have no commercial motives in the provision of information (deemed by various library acts); they aim for universal access to everyone in society; and they are 'free for all'. To summarise: libraries are always and forever. Who can say that of a search engine, or of any commercial organisation, regardless of size?</p> <p></p><p><a href="http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/holley" target="_blank">read more</a></p> issue64 feature article rose holley amazon british library google national library of australia oai open library wikipedia aggregation api archives bibliographic data bibliographic database browser copyright curation data database digitisation dissemination doc dublin core facebook flickr ftp google books identifier infrastructure lucene marc metadata mysql national library oai-pmh ocr open archives initiative persistent identifier preservation research resource sharing rss search technology tagging twitter usability video youtube Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000 editor 1563 at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk