COLLECTIONS AUSTRALIA NETWORK Australian cultural heritage collections online

Dear can-talkers,

We're pleased to announce that the National Library has just released the first prototype of its new Single Business Discovery Service for comment by key stakeholders.

The service is available at http://sbdsproto.nla.gov.au/ and provides integrated access to over 42 million metadata and text resources from a range of the National Library's collaborative services and from elsewhere.  For this initial version there are a range of data sources including: the Australian National Bibliographic Database<http://librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au>, Australian Newspapers<http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/>, Picture Australia<http://www.pictureaustralia.org/>, the
ARROW Discovery Service<http://search.arrow.edu.au/>, Pandora<http://pandora.nla.gov.au/>.  The new service will also provide the discovery interface for the People Australia<https://wiki.nla.gov.au/display/peau/Home> initiative.  Additionally we have included some external sources of data such as OAIster<http://www.oaister.org/>, Open Library<http://openlibrary.org/>, the Hathi Trust<http://www.hathitrust.org/>, the Internet Archive<http://www.archive.org> and the Library of Congress<http://www.loc.gov> tables of contents, publishers' descriptions and sample book chapters.

In leveraging off the collaborative approach the National Library takes with its discovery services, and in integrating results from across collections and formats, this new service will have distinct benefits for users.  For example a researcher searching for images relating to "George Woodroffe Goyder<http://sbdsproto.nla.gov.au/sbdp-ui/result?q=George+Woodroffe+Goyder>" will also be presented with results for people, books, manuscripts, maps and full text newspapers articles.  This new approach presents major benefits to the researcher who, in the past, would have had to visit each discovery service in turn and conduct separate searches for the material they sought.

Prior to using this service it is worth noting that it is a work in progress and you'll find the About<http://sbdsproto.nla.gov.au/sbdp-ui/general/about> pages useful in determining what has been done to date and what we are still planning to do.  We are keen for you to provide comment and feedback to further improve the offering.  Feedback forms are available at the bottom of every page of the service for you to provide feedback about the prototype in general or a specific page.

If you would like any further information about the project please visit the NLA Library Labs<https://wiki.nla.gov.au/display/LABS/Home> wiki.

Regards,
Basil

Basil Dewhurst | Manager, Resource Discovery Services | National Library of Australia
p: +61 2 6262 1046 | f: +61 2 6273 1180 | e: bdewhurst at nla.gov.au<mailto:bdewhurst at nla.gov.au> | w: www.nla.gov.au<http://www.nla.gov.au>

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