The Stable Tasmanian Open Repository Service (STORS) is a joint State Library of Tasmania and Service Tasmania Online initiative that began operation in July 2003. STORS allows government and non-government publishers in Tasmania to contribute electronic publications and documents to a central repository where they are both immediately accessible and maintained for posterity. STORS provides a persistent URL for each document as well as ongoing file conversion, a file checksum, and links reflecting document versions or relationships. The major operational problems that have emerged relate to file conversion and the complexities inherent in composite HTML documents.
Presents the results of a study into the effectiveness of Dublin Core metadata for retrieval. The metadata from twenty Australian government and educational organisations was analysed. The metadata was assessed for its capacity to facilitate title, creator/publisher, and subject access. From the results, it emerged that title metadata added little value, that creator/publisher access was flawed by inconsistent name formats, and that the subject terms used were too broad to produce increased precision and decreased recall. Specific suggestions are made as to how metadata creation in these three areas can be improved, and the relationship of Dublin Core to information foraging theory is explored.
The 2006 Robert D. Williamson Award went to Lloyd Sokvitne from the State Library of Tasmania for his outstanding contribution to librarianship especially in the area of metadata and online information discovery.
The 2006 Robert D. Williamson Award Citation for Lloyd Sokvitne reads as follows.
VALA’s most prestigious award is the Robert D. Williamson Award, which is in memory of one of the early pioneers of our industry, Bob Williamson. This biennial award is presented to an individual or organisation who or which, in the opinion of the judging panel, has made and is currently making an outstanding contribution to the development of information technology usage in Australian libraries and is positively and significantly influencing development in information technology usage within libraries.
So far as we are aware, unlike at least three previous recipients, the recipient of the Robert D. Williamson Award for 2006 has never been a member of the VALA Committee, although he has been a speaker at VALA conferences.
His earlier years in libraries were spent on what some might regard as an apprenticeship in cataloguing and collection development. (Other people, of course, might regard this as essential!)
In the early 1980s, this person, to whom the adjectives thoughtful, intelligent, collaborative and courteous have been applied, moved into Systems Support and Development in the State Library of his state. Here he embarked on a course of action that led to him becoming a leading force in the development of web indexing services and web portal delivery, not only in his own state, but nationally.
As Manager and then Senior Manager, he has overseen the development of his state’s government web portal and a comprehensive web indexing service, as well as a unified cross-jurisdictional government services portal. Along the way he has developed considerable expertise in metadata – in fact, one of his colleagues has described him as a “prophet with a deep concern for the quality of metadata” – and his professional interests also include information discovery on the web and web content preservation. This last interest resulted in the development and implementation of an open repository service for electronic documents in his state.
His work has already garnered him and his institution a number of awards, including the VALA Award for 2000, which was awarded to his institution, the State Library of Tasmania, for Service Tasmania Online.
This award publicly acknowledges the outstanding contribution he has made and is continuing to make to the development of information technology usage in Australian libraries, to his significant influence on the development of information services and his services to the profession. The fact that he was also willing and able, at very short notice, to fill the gap left by the unavoidable withdrawal from this Conference of Carl Lagoze is testament to his dedication and professionalism.
It is with great pleasure that VALA announces the winner of the Robert D. Williamson Award for 2006 – Lloyd Sokvitne.
In 2006, the State Library of Tasmania undertook a process to develop a facet-enabled catalogue that would replace its traditional OPAC. It became apparent that questions concerning which facets to provide were inextricably linked with the quality and availability of data from the traditional bibliographic database. This data reflected internal and external cataloguing policies that had varied over a number of years, and the State Library found that it had to extensively correct, modify, manipulate and create a range of data in order to provide the facets it required. This paper describes those processes in detail.