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National Digital Services - CAUL 21-22 Sept 2017.Docx.Pdf National Library of Australia - National Digital Services - CAUL 21-22 Sept 2017.docx.pdf NATIONAL DIGITAL SERVICES SHAPING AND TRANSFORMING THE AUSTRALIAN DIGITAL LANDSCAPE: COLLABORATION WITH THE HIGHER EDUCATION SECTOR ALISON DELLIT, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL NATIONAL COLLECTIONS ACCESS & AILEEN WEIR, DIRECTOR DIGITAL BUSINESS PAPER FOR CAUL COUNCIL - 21-22 SEPTEMBER 2017 This paper outlines the approach that the National Library of Australia is taking to transition towards a National Digital Services Agreement, which will replace existing collaborative arrangements and establish more holistic and inclusive management of digital library services, Trove, cataloguing and inter-library loan services, data aggregation, metrics and other services. University libraries are central stakeholders in Australia’s data, publishing and archival landscape, and the Library anticipates working closely and collaboratively with the higher education sector as we transition towards the new framework. The NLA and CAUL share common goals and values including a commitment to digital dexterity and fair, affordable and open access to knowledge. Collectively, we want to ensure our collections remain discoverable, accessible, and preserved for future generations. In an environment of diminishing budgets and expanding costs, collaboration can provide efficiencies and mutual support while showcasing the research value of aggregation. The importance of Trove Trove has played a key role in achieving these aspirations for nearly a decade. Built on the spine of the nation’s bibliographic database, Libraries Australia, the addition of full-text content resulted in a well-known, often passionately loved, platform of services. Along with other sectors, researchers have embraced Trove, using it to find resources, develop new knowledge, and share their work. An example of the way Trove assists in the research lifecycle is the work of Dr Katherine Bode, Associate Professor, Literary and Textual Studies at the Australian National University. Dr Bode devised a paratextual method to automatically identify and harvest fictional content scattered throughout Trove’s collection of 19th century newspapers. She discovered over 16,500 fictional works, identified a host of new Australian works and authors, and unearthed previously unlisted fiction by notable authors including Catherine Martin and Jessie Mabel Waterhouse. Her discoveries will be published in a new book A World of Fiction: Digital Archives and the Future of Literary History, due in 2018. Trove is now working with Dr Bode to develop an automated way to generate metadata for these hidden works of fiction and integrate the records back into the database. Other examples include: National Library of Australia - National Digital Services - CAUL 21-22 Sept 2017.docx.pdf The Prosecution Project – exploring the history of the criminal trial in Australia. Dr Mark Finnane, Professor of History in the School of Humanities, Griffith University, is analysing patterns of crime, prosecution and punishment in Australia from 1850-1960 using digitised Supreme Court registers and newspapers. Impact of 1918-19 flu epidemic on development of SA health services. Dr Mayumi Kako, School of Nursing, Flinders University, is using historical newspapers to investigate the extent of the flu outbreak and the public health response. The Australasian Language Technology Association is using the Trove Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software as a teaching tool to enable computer programming students to improve the quality of OCR text conversion. Trove operates on an unparalleled scale in Australia, showcasing content from over 1400 different organisations including every Australian university, over 40 government departments, over 50 museums and archives and more than 500 public and special libraries. Trove combines the metadata and holdings of all these collections with its growing corpus of digitised and born- digital content to present a comprehensive overview of Australian cultural heritage. The social history value found in the hundreds of digitised Australian newspapers and Government Gazettes is a goldmine for academic research and attracts thousands of users to Trove every day. Access to content in Trove is free to the end-user, a key to its success and a principle the National Library is committed to maintaining. Embracing the principle of open access, the National Library released the Trove Application Programming Interface (API) in 2012 inviting users to freely manipulate data and content. Since its release, the Library has issued over 1500 API keys enabling researchers and other institutions to generate new interfaces and applications and interrogate Trove data in unique ways that support digital humanities research. With additional investment, an improved API would offer greater potential to slice and dice Trove data, present customised views and answer research questions. Years of investment by the National Library in the digital infrastructure underpinning Trove is beginning to pay dividends. A world leader in managing large scale web content, Trove’s combination of metadata, digitised content, born-digital full-text and web archives, all accessible through a single platform, is unique in the world. Trove’s future Trove has been a great success, but managing this scale of online content is outstripping the resources of a single institution. The National Library knows that end-users want more functionality, contributors want more participative governance, greater recognition and better metrics and that the API needs attention. Trove’s potential to enable data analysis and research collaboration remains largely untapped. As outlined in the accompanying paper, additional investment in Trove would enhance the platform to provide more data, control and decision-making information to university librarians and research managers. The National Library’s vision for Trove is in direct alignment with CAUL’s stated aims to build digital dexterity in our communities and promote fair, affordable and open access to knowledge. Working with us to innovate, build and improve Trove will enable better integration and visibility of university library and repository content and strengthen its academic research potential. Some of the improvements NLA has on its wish list include: Improved metrics – Because Trove aggregates content from all universities, it becomes possible not only to summarise the totality of activity emanating from a particular Transformation through collaboration: shaping the Australian digital landscape 2 National Library of Australia - National Digital Services - CAUL 21-22 Sept 2017.docx.pdf institution but also generate cross-institutional comparative data. Sophisticated measures presented as a ‘statistics dashboard’ would assist CAUL members to meet its goal to “facilitate assessment and evaluation of library services that provide evidence of impact and value” and “maintain a useful and relevant collection of statistics”1 Customised views – Filters that limit searches to research outputs, theses, datasets and other content relevant to each university would enable a holistic view of institutional output. As described in the accompanying paper, this could ultimately lead to a ‘Trove Research Portal’ that aggregates content held across all Australian university repositories and collections. Enhanced access to full-text – The software and expertise gained from indexing full- text digitised newspapers, archived websites, podcasts and other content could be applied to the full-text content held in repositories. This has the potential not only to enhance cross-institutional research access to this rich content but also reduce the costs of creating human-generated metadata. Improved Application Programming Interface (API) – A more robust API would facilitate access to large-scale digital data and enable computationally intensive research across collections, institutions, disciplines and formats. Digitisation – The National Library has been digitising newspapers and other content for years and has developed considerable expertise that could be leveraged by university libraries to capture and expose their unique collections and “build capacity in publishing and digitisation”2. The Library could potentially act as a digitisation clearing house by overseeing and coordinating digitisation projects to “facilitate the exposure of digitised special collections in Australian university libraries”. Support for ERA, ARC and NHMRC reporting and compliance – The inclusion of ORCID persistent identifiers, Australian Research Council and other research project identification tags will enable institutions and individual researchers to track their outputs and open-access obligations through Trove. Developing reporting and metrics that support ERA and other research compliance frameworks would “strengthen the role of university libraries as a partner in the research process”3. Teacher toolkits – In addition to supporting the research agenda, the diverse content on Trove can be packaged to create teaching resources that promote university library collections and digitised content relevant to particular courses “supporting transformations in the role of university libraries as partners in learning and teaching”4 Leverage international relationships - Trove enjoys a global reputation and adheres to international standards of interoperability that align with comparator services such as Europeana. Trove’s established international
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