People Australia: a topic based approach to resource discovery
VALA 2008 CONCURRENT SESSION 15: Metadata
Thursday 7 February 2008 14:35 – 15:05
Persistent URL: http://www.vala.org.au/vala2008-proceedings/vala2008-session-15-dewhurst
Basil Dewhurst
Manager, Resource Discovery Services, National Library of Australia
http://www.nla.gov.au
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Abstract
The National Library has been enabling electronic resource discovery since 1981, when the Australian National Bibliographic Database was launched. Over the past decade, the Library has made discovery services such as Picture Australia, Music Australia and Libraries Australia freely available to a broad public. These services ensure that researchers gain rapid and easy access to the collections of the National Library and those of other libraries and collecting institutions. This paper introduces People Australia, a new collaborative topic based resource discovery service that the National Library is creating. The paper describes the service, demonstrates how it will significantly improve cross-domain resource discovery for researchers, and describes how People Australia will interchange metadata and enable the sharing of metadata about parties.