DO WE STILL NEED A CATALOGUE?Discovery, delivery, and engagement at the National Library of Australia

DR MARIE-LOUISE AYRES

The National Library of Australia• Creates most original Australian catalogue records;

purchases others from vendors• Digitised 2.5 million newspaper pages and 14,000

other items in 2012-2013• Subscribes to large number of licensed resources• Operates Libraries Australia: national union

catalogue and utility, (33 years)• Operates Trove: national discovery service (5 years)

Use of our collections and services• National Library’s online catalogue

– Down 29% on last year• Requests for material in Reading Rooms

– Up 2%• Requests for ILL/document supply

– Down 9%• Use of licensed eResources

– static• Visits to Trove

– 21 million, up 26% on last year– 75% visits come via Google…

Our problem• No single service for our physical collections +

all our digital collections + all our licensed resources

NLA Catalogue• VuFind catalogue: all

physical collections, non-newspaper digital collections, metadata for eResources.

• Supports eCallslips for all collections

eResources

• No commercial discovery layer, e.g. Primo or Summon

• Spend lots of AU$ on eResources but use is low

• Not integrated into catalogue OR Trove

Trove• Access to all NLA physical

collections + all NLA digital collections (including newspapers), but … not to all licensed resources.

• AND holdings and digital collections from 1000+ Australian libraries, museums etc..

The triggers• Our Voyager ILMS needs to be replaced• Budgets are tighter and there is no ‘pot of gold’• Public is hungry for full content• Combining access to bibliographic metadata,

full text indexing, and commercial databases is complex and expensive (we know…)

• So is maintaining separate systems…

ILMS• We certainly need a new Integrated Library

Management System: cataloguing; inventory; claiming; purchase orders; reporting; data import and export, but…

• Do we need a separate NLA catalogue interface for our users?

Discovery has left the building• 75% of all visits to our catalogue and Trove come

from Google• We no longer expect users to start their search at

our home pages• We expose all Trove content through an API, so it

will be available in many services• We invite others to use our resources in new ways

And Engagement has arrived• Trove user engagement:– 116 million lines of newspaper text corrected by

digital volunteers– 2.5 million tags added by users– 200,000 images added by users– 50,000 user lists created– Social media success– Partnership with users all over Australia

Our process• Working group of the finest minds in the

building: old hands and new thinkers• Determined to develop a master plan for our

users’ experience – even if it takes us years to get there

• Mapping systems, workflows and data flows

Visit us

nla.gov.au and trove.nla.gov.au