[Yr7-10it] National Library SBDS Prototype

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

National Library of Australia

 http://sbdsproto.nla.gov.au/

 http://sbdsproto.nla.gov.au/sbdp-ui/general/about


About the SBDS Prototype

SBDS will be a new discovery service focused on Australia, Australians, 
and items found in Australian collecting institutions. 

It will provide a single point of access to resources currently 
discoverable via the Library's multiple discovery services, and to 
digitised material freely available online anywhere in the world.

The primary purpose of this first prototype version is to develop the 
technical framework to support this new discovery service, and as far as 
possible ensure that the technologies we are using will provide 
acceptable performance, especially for record updates. 

The design so far is based primarily on decisions made within the project 
team to allow rapid development of the prototype. What is there now will 
form the basis for feedback, ideas for improvement, and input into the 
design of new features from a wide range of people.

The system is a work in progress, and we have made it available for you 
to follow our development as we build and improve it. The prototype will 
be constantly updated as it evolves into a system planned for release 
into production in the third quarter of this year. 


What sort of things can I find?

You can find: 

* Text resources such as books, theses, reports, research articles, raw 
data sets from research, book chapters, sheet music, conference 
proceedings, and papers and records collected by significant people and 
organisations 

* Maps and Audio-visual resources such as photos, artworks, postcards, 
videos, musical sound, sheet music and sound recordings of interviews 

* Full text of selected Australian newspapers, from between 1803 and 1954 

* Copies of significant Australian websites which may no longer be 
available online 

* Information about significant people and organisations 

Some of these items will be available online while others are available 
in hard copy only. 

Where is the data coming from so far?

Metadata: 

The Australian National Bibliographic Database - 19 million items in 
Australian libraries 

Picture Australia - 1.6 million pictures and photos from Australian 
cultural institutions 

Australian Research Online - 0.3 million Australian research outputs 

OAIster - 20 million resources from insitutions world wide, including 
many scholarly insitutions 

Open Library - 0.3 million online public domain books 

Hathi Trust - 0.2 million online public domain books 

Wikipedia - 0.3 million keywords (tags) associated with books 

People Australia - 0.2 million people including many biographies and 
relationships from the Australian Women's Register, Music Australia,
Australia Dancing and Libraries Australia 

Text: 

Australian Newspapers - Full text articles from historic Australian 
newspapers, 1803 to 1954 

Pandora - Archived copies of significant Australian websites 

The National Library of Australia's manuscript finding aids - 349 

The Library of Congress - 0.4 million tables of contents, publisher's 
descriptions and sample chapters of books 

Internet Archive - 0.1 million full text public domain books 


What does SBDS Stand for?

BDS is our internal project name for this service. It stands for Single 
Business Discovery Service. The service does not yet have a final brand 
name. 


I want to know the technical details. What can you tell me?

The prototype has been developed in-house using: 

the Java programming language 
SOLR/Lucene for indexing 
MySQL for record clustering 
Jetty and Restlets as the HTTP container, FreeMarker as the templating 
language 

Project Team

Susan Collier (Project Manager) 
Kent Fitch (Developer) 
Simon Jacob (Developer) 
Joanna Meakins (Business Analyst) 


Feedback

What do you think? What can we do better?
This prototype is an exploration of ideas and techniques aimed at making 
information easier to find and showing it within a useful context.

This development of this prototype will be strongly influenced by your 
feedback, so please give us your comments and suggestions on how to 
improve it. Comments and suggestions ...

--

Cheers people
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia