Confessions of a technophile

The National Library of Australia is giving users a glimpse into SBDS, an in-house developed discovery service focused on Australian content held by institution in the country. Essentially, it provides 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.

This is one of the most laudable efforts in the development of information discovery platforms I've seen in recent years. The user interface is simple, yet displays search results that do not overwhelm users. You can choose to look for content that's only available online, in addition to external sources that are not held by the NLA.

The metadata comes from several sources including the Australian National Bibliographic Database, Picture Australia, Australian Research Online, OAIster, the Open Library, Hathi Trust and Wikipedia.

For now, the only thing that's lacking is the ability for users to tag and comment on content.