Contributing as an organisation

If you have joined Picture Australia to increase access to and use of your image collections, or if you are thinking about doing so; the following information provides an overview of how the service works and the standards that underpin it.

The benefits of participating in Picture Australia

The benefits to your agency in participating in Picture Australia are both strategic and operational and include:

  • participating in a national service provides a high level of awareness and access to your own image collections and services;
  • the opportunity to work cross-sectorally while not losing the individuality of your unique collection - and ongoing promotion of the collaborative nature of the service may attract additional funding;
  • the opportunity to help shape and share the future directions of Picture Australia and your own services in response to user feedback;
  • opportunities to gain access to new user communities - links between the service and other national services are explored by Picture Australia on behalf of all participating agencies to target niche markets, such as the education sector or the genealogy sector;
  • the resources required to participate in the service are minimal, as the service has adopted a centralised model that takes a copy of standard descriptive data;
  • supporting the use of the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus will improve the quality of resource description;
  • information-sharing between participants with regard to Web design, metadata and image standards; and
  • connections made by the Picture Australia service to other services overseas are valuable in terms of both gathering operating advice and extending markets.

The benefits to your users in having your collection available via Picture Australia are:

  • the ability to search across a range of Australian cultural agencies more easily in terms of time and simplicity in a complex Web environment;
  • increased access to collections through the 'one-shop stop' design with links to significant collections around the nation;
  • increased consistency in search results through the use of standard descriptive information; and
  • the increased breadth of coverage resulting in a higher level of satisfaction, and encouraging continued use of the service.

How Picture Australia works

Each image in the service is held on a participating agency's web site and is displayed as part of a web page. The page includes the image itself and information that describes the image, in HTML (hypertext markup language). This descriptive information is called metadata. The Picture Australia service uses metadata in the Dublin Core format. Every two months the National Library gathers this metadata from each participating agency using metadata harvesting software.

Once gathered, the metadata is stored at the National Library in XML (extensible markup language) format. An index is built using this metadata which Picture Australia users search when using the service.

The software being used by the Library to gather the metadata and build the search index is TeraText from InQuirion Pty Ltd. The preview or 'thumbnail' images in search results are retrieved from web sites at the time of a search and are not held centrally at the Library. This allows each agency to retain management of its own images and metadata.

This system is simple and scalable. It adds value to the pictorial collections of cultural agencies already accessible on the Internet through their amalgamation within the Picture Australia service. The technical investment needed to join the Picture Australia service is low especially if image collections are already available on the Internet.

The role of metadata in the service

The Picture Australia participants have chosen to use the Dublin Core metadata schema to describe the images being provided as part of this service.

Participating agencies often have existing descriptive information for their images and convert this existing data into the Dublin Core format to include in Picture Australia. Read the metadata guidelines for more information about this process, including examples of how other agencies have undertaken it.

Assigning subject terms and the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus

Thesauri provide lists of preferred terms to use as subject headings to try to provide a standard way of describing (and ultimately searching for) items. For example bushranger may be listed as the term preferred to bush ranger, bushrangers, highwayman or highwaymen. This helps ensure that everyone who uses the thesaurus, describes and searches for bushranger rather than any other term.

The Picture Australia participants have endorsed the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus (APT) as the preferred thesaurus for the service. The APT provides contemporary Australian terminology for the description of images and its use will ensure the common description of pictorial collections across Australian libraries, museums and archives. More information about the APT is available on the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus web site.

Use of the APT has not been made mandatory as there will obviously be agencies who have made significant investments in the use of other thesauri. However, agencies who are starting out in the description process are encouraged to consider using the APT and those agencies with alternate existing practices may consider extending their scope to include APT terms.

When you join Picture Australia it is helpful if you can provide an indication of the thesauri used so that the range of terms in use may be defined.

In the longer term it may be possible to map the varying thesauri to one over-arching one for the service as a whole - which users can tap in to for assistance in searching.

A guide to the Picture Australia service

Picture Australia has produced a booklet, A Guide to the Picture Australia Service that encompasses most of the information included here and in the metadata guidelines, along with additional information on the process of joining the service. You can request a copy of the booklet by contacting us.