Next Gen OPAC

The National Library of Austalia has released the first prototype of its new Single Business Discovery Service for comment by key stakeholders.

From an email launching the prototype:

The prototype 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, Australian Newspapers, Picture Australia, the ARROW Discovery Service, and PANDORA. The new service will also provide the discovery interface for the People Australia initiative.

Additionally we have included some external sources of data such as OAIster, Open Library, the Hathi Trust, the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress tables of contents, publishers' descriptions and sample book chapters.

Prior to using this service it is worth noting that it is a work in progress and you’ll find the 'About' pages useful in determining what has been done to date and what we are still planning to do. We welcome your granular feedback in the form at the bottom of every page, and strategic discussion in the SBD Project topic at our Libraries Australia ning site. [Not on ning? Contact our Help Desk 1800 026 155.]

Lotsa' learning

My recent online activities have been focussed around running a Learning 2.0 program - our learning blog can be found at: http://citylibrarieslearning.wordpress.com/

Our Twitter account is: http://twitter.com/TownsvilleLib

My personal learning blog is: http://stainedglasswaterfalllearningblog.wordpress.com/

...and that doesn't leave much time for regular blogging or tweeting at the moment! :-)

The program is going really well, staff are responding and seem to be having a great time.

The Library vs. the Search Engine

I love this idea!

http://mosmanlibraryblogs.com/challenge/

From the website:

The Set Up
We're pitting Mosman Library’s online reference collection against what you can find from the search box on the world wide web! Each day during Library & Information Week we’ll be posting a question that represents the range of queries that we get at Mosman Library.

You decide who gives the best answers and wins the challenge.

The Players

Our Reference Librarian Jane B will represent Mosman Library. She’ll use only Mosman Library’s electronic resources to answer the question.
Our Internet & IT Services Librarian Ken D will represent the search engine. He’ll use only freely-available web resources to formulate his answer.