Service Guide

Overview

Picture Australia provides one simple search of many pictorial collections, enabling access to over 1.7 million digitised photographs, artworks and artefacts that illustrate Australia. These images are drawn from collections held within libraries, museums, archives and galleries from across Australia and overseas. Through exposure of metadata to Internet search engines, the National Library aims to increase access to both its own digital collections and the collections of cultural agencies participating in collaborative services like Picture Australia.

The Picture Australia service was launched in September 2000 and is freely available via the Internet. It is an invaluable tool to students, teachers, researchers and commercial enterprises in Australia and overseas.

All contributors use the same descriptive information, called a ‘metadata schema’. The metadata schema used is Dublin Core (DC). The Dublin Core metadata is harvested weekly to a central index hosted by the National Library of Australia. For more information see the Technical Guide.

Copyright

Provision of digital images and clearance of associated rights is a responsibility of Picture Australia contributors. Images described in Picture Australia are communicated from the web sites of contributing institutions. Contributors must ensure that they have the requisite authority to grant a licence to Picture Australia to harvest, copy, host and store all or part of their metadata on the Library’s computer systems and provide access to their images through the Picture Australia service.

If an item (‘work’) is in the public domain contributing collecting institutions are encouraged to identify this in the DC Rights field. This enables retrieval in Picture Australia’s advance search, facilitating access to this common cultural and intellectual heritage.  If the contributing agency is the creator of the work, the selection of a Creative Commons licence as a universally recognised code is encouraged.

Picture Australia content

The images represented in Picture Australia are digital surrogates of any visual item with any connection to Australia. In addition to photographs, these may include fine art, portraits, posters, maps and three-dimensional artefacts such as sculpture, scrimshaw, costume, armour, and buildings.

The following formats are not normally included:

  • Text, unless it forms part of an artefact and the artefact is digitised
  • Text-based manuscripts
  • Whole video or audio clips, unless a frame of a video is presented as a picture

For text-related items, contributors should consider the legibility of the text and its suitability for presentation as a thumbnail-sized image. There is no restriction on the number of images harvested from any one contributor.

Statements provided by each contributor document the breadth of image topics within Picture Australia Collections.

Benefits of contributing to Picture Australia

User benefits: Simplicity of using one search to discover images in many collections

  • Guaranteed quality images from trusted information providers
  • Vast coverage of topics from an ever-expanding number of collections
  • Connect to image records through the bibliographic software Endnote X . Download the connection file (via FTP) from the Endnote web site.

Organisational benefits:

  • Enhanced level of public awareness of individual collections and services
  • Value-adding to pictorial collections through aggregation within a single service
  • Ability to work collaboratively across sectors and all levels of government without compromising the uniqueness of each collection
  • Access to new user communities in Australia and overseas, through innovative projects like the partnership with Yahoo!'s Flickr. The Flickr project has raised the global profile of Picture Australia
  • Targeted marketing to audiences such as the education, genealogy, library, IT and research communities
  • Minimal resource requirements, as the system simply harvests standard descriptive metadata weekly
  • Information sharing between contributors regarding metadata, digitisation, delivery and current Photographic Preservation Standards
  • Support for the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus to improve quality of resource description
  • Opportunities for input into enhancements of the service
  • Increased visibility through indexing by other search engines such as Google
  • Work as part of a research network with: the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online (DAAO), the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) and Education Network Australia  (EDNA), which connect their search results to Picture Australia images

Liaison between contributors

The National Library of Australia facilitates several avenues for liaison between Picture Australia contributors:

  • Email discussion list. Contributors are automatically added to the list when they join the service
  • Annual contributors’ meeting. This is usually convened in the first quarter of each year and all contributors are invited to submit agenda items. Picture Australia staff report on the performance of the service in accordance with its obligations under the Service Level Agreement
  • Links to contributors’ services from the Picture Australia website’s Contact us and Collection pages
  • Access to a contributors’ section of the website, where reports, presentations, marketing and statistical information are regularly updated

Picture Australia mailbox

Users may contact Picture Australia through an online enquiry form. Picture Australia staff will respond to all messages. Where applicable, enquiries are forwarded to the appropriate contributor for response.

Picture Australia statistics

Data about website usage includes:

  • Daily reports of search terms and the number of records retrieved
  • Monthly reports summarising the search terms used, which can be sorted alphabetically or by frequency of requests
  • General usage reports including general statistics and data on: images accessed, visitors and demographics, activity statistics, referrers, search terms, request a copy, browsers and platforms

How does Picture Australia work?

Picture Australia is an online service that provides access to distributed image collections containing material of relevance to Australians. Records of images in the Service are provided by Picture Australia contributors.
Summary of how the service works:

  1. Contributors join Picture Australia.
  2. Contributors ensure that the metadata for their images complies with the Picture Australia Metadata Schema.
  3. Contributors make the metadata about their images available for harvesting via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) or Harvest Control Lists (HCL).
  4. The National Library harvests metadata using a custom built metadata harvester. The harvested metadata records are then made available through the Picture Australia service. Each record in the Picture Australia service links back to the full record (and image) in the digital repository of the contributing institution.
  5. Regular update harvests are conducted to collect new or changed records.

See Technical guide

Picture Australia search functionality

The search functionality is made available to users via a simple word search, advanced search, and themed picture trails. There is a ten-minute inactivity time-out on all searches.

The search results are returned in relevance-ranked order. This takes into account where the search terms appear in the information about the image and whether an exact match was found. For example, the image title is considered more relevant than the image publisher.

Simple word search

The simple word search is applied across the Title, Creator, Subject and Coverage fields of the Dublin Core schema. The default Boolean operator is AND. Searching is not case sensitive. Phrase searches using double quote marks are available, for example "Sydney Opera House". Word stems can be searched using the question mark (?) or asterisk (*) as a truncation element. For example, searching on librar? will find words such as library, librarian, librarians, libraries etc.

Advanced search

The advanced search capability allows searching on each or all of the metadata elements in the Dublin Core schema. It is not case sensitive, and punctuation (other than quotes and wildcards) is stripped prior to matching. You can also search images from a particular institution.

The advanced search lets you search using a number of different fields or combination of fields, these are described below:

Search Field

Description

with all of these words

Find images which contain all of these words (or numbers)

with the exact phrase

This is the same as using double quotation marks to find images which contain an exact phase

with any of these words

Find images which contain any one of these words

without these words

Find images which don't contain these words

taken by

Find images created by an individual or group

taken in the year

Find images taken or created in a particular year

Show images from

Find images from any one of Picture Australia's many contributors or exclude a particular contributor. For example, to search for historical pictures exclude Flickr images.

Display

Choose the number of results displayed per page

Picture Trails

Trails are based on popular subjects and link to curriculum profiles, or events of national significance. New users find them a helpful inroad into the wealth of content available in Picture Australia. Each trail includes up to 50 images, representing content from many collections.

Requirements for contributing to Picture Australia

Picture Australia seeks the following obligations from contributors:

1. Service level agreement

Before mid-2009, contributors paid an annual fee towards the costs of the generation of publicity materials and enhancements to the service.

There are now no longer any fees involved in joining Picture Australia.

Prior to a new contributor joining, the National Library of Australia conducts a technical trial of the metadata harvesting and image access requirements using a sample of images.

2. Provision of metadata

Contributors are required to supply metadata of high quality for their images.  The more elements completed, the greater the opportunity for systems to utilise the metadata in various ways. The minimum requirements for contributing to Picture Australia are the title and identifier elements of the Dublin Core metadata schema.

Any changes to a contributing agency’s harvest list must be forwarded in advance to Picture Australia staff, to avoid harvest failures.

3. Contact details

Each contributor needs to supply an email address and a designated contact person, adding to the Picture Australia discussion list. The postal address, telephone, fax, and email details of each contributor are included on the Contact us page.

4. Secure access

For harvesting purposes, a secure sub-directory on the contributor’s site is preferred. The National Library of Australia will negotiate secure access to the server as required, in consultation with IT support staff.

5. Thumbnail specifications

The thumbnail-size of an image impacts on both the uniform presentation of search results and the scrolling functionality. It also affects the page-loading speed, depending upon network bandwidth, creating an issue for geographically remote users.

Picture Australia requires that thumbnails be a maximum of 150 pixels in their longest dimension. The other dimension may be less than or equal to 150 pixels, maintaining the aspect ratio of the image.

Numerous free and commercial software packages are available to automate thumbnail generation from medium or high resolution versions.

6. Provision of logos

All contributors to Picture Australia have their logo on the Collections page of Picture Australia. The logo(s) should be provided as GIF files and sent as an email attachment.

7. Descriptive text for the Collections page

Descriptive text provided by contributors outlines the scope of their image collection, and is accessible on the Collections page of the Picture Australia web site. Links to the contributor’s ordering and permissions information is also required for the Request a copy service.

8. Representative images

Contributors are required to supply a number of representative images from their collection, preferably as TIFF files with a resolution of at least 300 dpi, for promotional purposes.

Publicity materials

Contributors may obtain copies of Picture Australia publicity materials to assist with promoting the service. Materials include fliers, bookmarks, stickers and postcards.

For more information

For more information on Picture Australia, please contact the Manager, Picture Australia.