Information Online started well this morning, and there were two really good sessions that I caught.
Tony Boston and Alison Dellit from the National Library of Australia spoke about developments with Libraries Australia, in particular their efforts to include relevance ranking in search results. They also discussed the other 'ideals' they are working on, to make Libraries Australia even more user friendly and user centered. These ideals included:
- ranking results
- clustering
- FRBR
- Spell checker
- Citation links
- annotations (tagging)
- Integration
I wonder how long it might be before we could use a service like Libraries Australia as a local OPAC? Users searching for a known item not held by their local library would instantly be exposed to the holdings of libraries around Australia. Local holdings could be ranked higher in results list, but I wonder how local circulation data could be included....
Anyhow, the National Library seems to be continuing to do a great job in embracing the new opportunities that new technology is bringing, in order to make our library collections more accessible to our users.
