Tasmania online: the first year.Our first year of operation has proved to be highly successful and rewarding. We have established a Tasmanian library www service that is proving to be both in demand on the internet and useful to community groups within Tasmania. Tasmania Online is a State Library of Tasmania The State Library of Tasmania is the organisation which runs the library system in the state of Tasmania, Australia. The State Library operates as part of the Tasmanian Department of Education, and maintains close ties with Tasmanian schools and senior secondary colleges. service with two major tasks * to identify, collate col·late tr.v. col·lat·ed, col·lat·ing, col·lates 1. To examine and compare carefully in order to note points of disagreement. 2. To assemble in proper numerical or logical sequence. 3. and index all significant Tasmanian content on the world wide web * to assist nonprofit A corporation or an association that conducts business for the benefit of the general public without shareholders and without a profit motive. Nonprofits are also called not-for-profit corporations. Nonprofit corporations are created according to state law. community groups to publish their own world wide web pages using our facilities and internet server When starting, we faced a wide range of conceptual and practical challenges. The major issues revolved re·volve v. re·volved, re·volv·ing, re·volves v.intr. 1. To orbit a central point. 2. To turn on an axis; rotate. See Synonyms at turn. 3. around developing standards for describing and indexing world wide web documents, techniques and strategies to search and identify Tasmanian content, and internal procedures to maintain web pages and manage the site. In the last year we have developed * site scope and procedures manuals * publishing standards and guide sheets for web editing and input * techniques and processes to structure and manage web pages and directories * methods to verify our www links and coordinate changes across the wide number of pages we maintain (manual processes augmented partially by automated scripts) * skills in web page creation/editing and graphics scanning/manipulation * procedures to allow remote access and editing of web pages by our clients Our second significant area of activity is in assisting nonprofit community groups to publish world wide web pages. Tasmania Online staff have been involved in training clients in web page editing techniques and in advising them on the best ways to design and structure their content. We have found keen interest in using this new medium from all sectors, ranging from 20 year olds to those over 70, from professional people with lots of computing experience to those who have never touched a keyboard before. It has been a rewarding aspect of our service, but it has also proved to be very time consuming and labor intensive Labor Intensive A process or industry that requires large amounts of human effort to produce goods. Notes: A good example is the hospitality industry (hotels, restaurants, etc), they are considered to be very people-oriented. See also: Capital Intensive, Trading Dollars . Staffing Although funded for the first six months on a temporary project basis, we are now operating on an ongoing basis with three staff in Hobart. Our operations have also gone statewide, with a staff member managing Tasmania Online services from the Launceston Reference Library, and another providing services from Burnie and Devonport. Clients published: 94 These include a wide range of nonprofit community and governmental organisations from all areas of the state. We have assisted health support groups (the Tasmanian Women's Health Women's Health Definition Women's health is the effect of gender on disease and health that encompasses a broad range of biological and psychosocial issues. Network provides a world class information resource on women's health issues), common interest groups (eg National Council of Women Tasmania), service groups (eg Rotary), Site usage statistics show that we have now reached over 250,000 page accesses in the last 12 months. These accesses have been from over 42,000 unique hosts that have averaged 5.9 pages per visit. All Tasmania Online internal usage has been excluded. Significant changes in our usage patterns are emerging, with an increasing proportion now coming from international locations. Using domain names as a guide, sporting groups (eg Three Peaks Yacht Race The Three peaks yacht race occurs each year in June in the United Kingdom. The race is based on an idea of the late Bill Tilman, who had advocated a Three Peaks Challenge route NOT using motorised transport. ), local government (eg Kingborough City Council), cultural organisations (eg Theatre Royal), and schools (Hilliard Christian School A Christian School is a school run on Christian principles or by a Christian organization. The nature of Christian schools varies enormously from country to country according to the religious, educational, and political culture. ). Site size Number of links in our A to Z listing: 1100 (we had about 250 in February 1996). we found that 72 per cent of our visits came from Australian hosts in our first six months. In our last month, only 50 per cent come from Australia, with the rest from overseas (the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. is by far the largest visitor with about 37 per cent of the total). Looking at absolute numbers, the Australian component has continued to rise but has been far outstripped by the growth in international accesses. As would be expected the number of countries visiting Tasmania Online continues to grow and at the end of February 1997 we have had visits from 89 different countries. The hourly usage figures for our server also reflect the above change, in that close to 50 per cent of our accesses now come outside the Australian eastern standard time business hours BUSINESS HOURS. The time of the day during which business is transacted. In respect to the time of presentment and demand of bills and notes, business hours generally range through the whole day down to the hours of rest in the evening, except when the paper is payable it a bank or by a of 9.00am to 5.00pm. Future issues and needs Indexing Our next project is to install the Tasmanian based www search engine that we have developed. This will allow users to search for any term contained in all the Tasmanian web documents that we point to. This is now in final testing stage and will be available in March 1997. After this, we will begin work on processes that will automate and assist in the creation of the web pages that contain our listings. This has been a manual process which is very susceptible to error and changes in the external environment. We also will work to develop more effective indexing terms and structures that are easier to administer, allow faster cataloguing, and increase the effectiveness and usability of subject browsing for our internet users Internet user n → internauta m/f Internet user Internet n → internaute m/f . As metadata standards such as the Dublin Core A set of meta-data descriptions about resources on the Internet. Used for resource discovery, it contains data elements such as title, creator, subject, description, date, type, format and so on. Dublin Core descriptions are often included in HTML meta tags. mature, we will endeavour to incorporate these standards in our descriptive processes. Community publishing We will shortly move from our previous powerful, but difficult to learn, text html editor A low-level Web site authoring tool that is essentially a text editor, specialized for writing HTML code. It assists the HTML author by cataloging all HTML tags and common structures in menus and by being able to catch certain syntax errors. to one that provides a wysiwyg editing environment. In addition we are developing a complete self instructional package to allow new community groups to work independently while using our facilities in the publication of their web pages. Our objective is to make the publishing process both easy for our clients and less time consuming for Tasmania Online staff. Community standards Community standards are local norms bounding acceptable conduct. Sometimes these standards can itemized in a list that states the community's values and sets guidelines for participation in the community. We have already experienced difficult questions related to the type of material that we should help publish or point to in our indexes. The problems of controversial material on the internet will challenge us to provide better guides to warn users of content or to enable properly configured con·fig·ure tr.v. con·fig·ured, con·fig·ur·ing, con·fig·ures To design, arrange, set up, or shape with a view to specific applications or uses: browsers to filter out undesired content. Lloyd Sokvitne is Senior Systems Librarian Tasmania Online. Address: State Library of Tasmania 91 Murray Street Murray Street may refer to:
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion