by Matthew Stuckings As the leader of the field in library and information services in our country, the National Library of Australia recognises the value of small, experimental projects alongside its robust, sustainable, standards-based infrastructure. Many of our most successful online discovery services began as small but scaleable innovations. In conscious recognition of the importance of social participation, we are experimenting with enhancements to our discovery services to allow our users to contribute and disseminate their knowledge and resources. In January 2006 we began to harvest selected metadata from Flickr for inclusion in our collaborative discovery service for online pictures, PictureAustralia (http://www.pictureaustralia.org). Already containing over a million images relating to Australia, this initiative has amplified the size and range of contemporary content available using minimal resources. In addition, the Flickr collaboration has become an important collection development tool, as some images are subsequently acquired for the Library’s permanent pictorial collection. In recognition of the burgeoning power of the Wiki phenomenon, the Library introduced Wiki software to our dance portal Australia Dancing (http://www.australiadancing.org) in July 2006. The initiative, called ‘Take Part’, is an experiment in enabling our users to situate their stories, reviews, profiles and comments alongside authoritative articles produced by our curators on Australian dance. The Library is not intending to compete with sites like Wikipedia, but to expand the opportunities for our established market of special communities of interest. In the present climate of suspicion about user-generated data, we also offer the advantage of authority as a cultural institution. The Library has also begun experimenting with user annotation across all our resource discovery services. Our newspaper digitisation project, for example, will incorporate new opportunities for users to enrich our institution-created metadata. Family historians, some of the heaviest users of the newspaper collections, will be able to contribute further information about people and events found in the articles. Whilst all of these initiatives are in their infancy and we are working out the full range of possible applications, our small experiments are anticipated to pave the way to a more ubiquitous empowerment of users and enhancement of the services of Australia's libraries and beyond.
These are some of the instructional screencasts and podcasts for Five Weeks to a Social Library.
