National Library of Australia joins the Commons on Flickr

Well, it’s taken a while but the National Library of Australia has finally started adding material from their collection to the Flickr Commons. Considering how large a collection of material the NLA holds, it seems only logical that they would want to make their holdings even more widely available than they currently are. The NLA is clearly working to continue to increase the exposure of their collection items, especially with the impending opening of their permanent Treasures Gallery.

Cross promotion aside, there NLA’s stream so far highlights a diverse range of images, including images from the Ballets Russes Australian tour 1936-1940, the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, flooding in the Murray Darling region in 1886 and images from Antarctic expeditions between 1911 and 1914.

 

 

 

 

 

As with many of the images in the Commons, there are a fair few in the NLA’s stream which show unidentified people – if you know who they are, don’t be afraid to comment and help clear up the mystery!

Trove enhancements

Late last week, The National Library of Australia announced the release of Trove 4.0. The latest version includes a few interesting developments, which Alison Dellit explains:

• Trove now searches across millions of articles from GALE and Informit.  These articles are found in a new zone called “journals, articles and datasets”. An example article is: Where is Osama Bin Laden? From the Gulf News in 2010. Most of these articles can be viewed online for free if your library has already purchased a subscription from GALE or Informit. Click on the article title in Trove, then look for your library name on the “online” tab. Further help is available here. We are working with vendors and libraries to further improve the quality of article links and authentication.

• The Trove homepage has been redesigned to make it easier for us to communicate with you, and for new users to understand the benefits of Trove.

This version would not have been possible without collaboration across the library sector, particularly the support of National and State Libraries Australasia.

Information for libraries with Gale and Informit subscriptions is available here.

If you have any questions or comments on the new release, we’d love to hear them. Just use this form, and someone will get back to you. If you want a phone conversation, specify that in the message and we’ll give you a call.

We thank you for your ongoing support!

Alison Dellit

Ag/Trove Manager

adellit@nla.gov.au

You can keep up to date with the latest Trove news here.

Where to next for Trove?

Well, who better to give you the answers than Trove’s manager, Rose Holley! There are a number of new features in the works, according to her latest article over at DLib, which should further enhance the users’ experience and their ability to “find and get” the material that they’re looking for. The following is the presentation that accompanies her paper.

What’s a good do without a frock?

Still image from ABC video of AWW celebration

To celebrate the digitisation of 50 years of the Australian Women’s Weekly (from 1933 to 1982), the National Library of Australia hosted a frock filled do last Friday.The ABC was on hand to cover the event, which featured NLA staff in vintage clothing and the catering featured recipes made famous by the Women’s Weekly over the years – everything from pigs in blankets to pineapple punch.

Whilst the Library has made a good effort to digitise the entirety of issues of the Australian Women’s Weekly, there are still a few issues which they have been unable to locate. Check the list of missing issues if you think you might be able to help fill in the gaps! In the meantime, take a browse though what’s been captured so far – it’s worth a look for the covers alone.

Goodbye gateway, hello Australia and the world

Trove continues to go from strength to strength, continually adding more items to its already 90 million plus, and encouraging further interaction – from adding comments and tagging, to discussing your findings with other users in the freshly minted Trove forum – with resources from all across Australia, as well as some from further afield. If you want to know more, have a read of Rose Holley’s article “Trove : innovation in access to information in Australia” in the latest issue of Ariadne.

Innovative Ideas forum podcasts

Podcasts from the recent Innovative Ideas Forum, hosted by the National Library of Australia, are now freely available for download.  You can download the full seminar or pick and choose from individual podcasts.

Innovative Ideas Forum 2009

This year’s Innovative Ideas Forum, hosted by the National Library of Australia, is focusing on “The value and significance of social networking for cultural institutions”.

The NLA is tackling this idea head on by encouraging delegates to participate in some social networking of their own. Content from delegates who tag their blog posts, presentations, photos etc with the tag iif2009, and Twitterers who utilise #iif2009 in their tweets will be aggregated and made available as part of Innovative Ideas Forum’s website. If you can’t make it, you can follow all of the action via the aggregated information stream here.

Power to the people!

As some of you might be aware, the National Library of Australia has been undertaking a huge newspaper digitisation project. Whilst OCR software has come a long way in providing access to these texts, nothing is perfect. It is, in fact, users of this material that are making the outputted OCR text even better by providing feedback and correcting the OCR transcriptions as they go. The Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program states that “Users have corrected over 2 million lines of electronic text in over 100,000 articles. Over 46,000 tags have been added to articles and many comments about information in articles added.”

There is an article in the latest issue of D-Lib Magazine by Rose Holley, the Manager of the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program, that covers this in more detail.

Oh dear…

I looked up the National Library of of Australia on You Tube… 

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=national+library+of+australia&search_type=&aq=f

Here is a link to the beautiful etsy… http://www.etsy.com/ you can search by object, colour or seller… it is really well organised.

KF