The National Library of Australia’s new bibliographic and information service will support cooperation and resource sharing within the Australian library community.

With the rapid growth of the Internet, libraries are no longer the obvious first choice for record creation, information searching and sharing. The definition of their role in the information revolution has led, however, to new awareness of their strengths, which information technologists may still be developing.

Building on ABN, the Australian Bibliographic Network, which since 1982 has provided shared online cataloguing for Australian libraries, the Network Service Project, expects to be able to put improved systems in place by the first quarter of 1999. The vast database of ABN supported an online cataloguing service for 300 Australian libraries, a national union catalogue of 1000 libraries, and an interlibrary loan system. It contained 14 million bibliographic records, 7 million of which have holdings. Its strengths have been as a resource-sharing tool and as a bibliographic aid supporting catalogues and their products in different formats.

To complement ABN, in the late 1980s the National Library OZLINE, started a hosting service for some 30 databases. In the early 1990s the Library decided to redevelop its networked services through another system, NDIS, the National Document and Information Service, in partnership with the National Library of New Zealand. It was abandoned in 1996.

It is now planned to port the ABN to a new platform, Kinetica, which will provide improved networked services to Australian libraries. Ten million bibliographic records and 28 million holdings will be moved to it. Three separate products will be implemented for the new service: AMICUS for the management of bibliographic databases and cataloguing services, LibriVision for World Wide Web access to AMICUS, and to CJK, the National Chinese Japanese Korean System, so that users will be able to search these simultaneously, and VDX for interlibrary loans.

The new interlibrary loan system was launched in January 1998. The system is currently being demonstrated in all capital cities. Libraries will use a Web interface to send loan requests to each other, replacing the paper based and manual processes still in use in many Australian libraries. The VDX system is specifically designed to make electronic requests more attractive to libraries, with more effective results for users.

A six-year contract has been awarded to IBM Global Services Australia to implement and support AMICUS and LibriVision systems. The VDX software used for loans and document delivery was developed in Britain. Data migration from ABN is now in progress, and the huge task of training potential users in more than 1300 organisations across Australia is proceeding.

There are plans to reach out beyond the Library and library communities in 1999 through pilot studies of end user access. Kinetica will be very user friendly, and will enable end users to do their own searching of the National Bibliographic Database instead of having to ask Library staff to help them find out which books and journals are held in which libraries around Australia.