standards transforming Australian digital libraries

Ariadne, Issue 41
How the Use of Standards Is Transforming Australian Digital Libraries
Includes an interesting metadata workflow.

The National Library of Australia (NLA) has been able to achieve new business practices such as digitising its collections and hosting federated search services by exploiting recent standards including the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), handles for persistent identification, and metadata schemas for new types of content. Each instantiation of the OAI-PMH opens up new ways of creating and managing our digital libraries while making them more accessible for learning, teaching and research purposes. Using handles as the basis for managing the persistence of a large, digitised collection has allowed information to be identified and cited in many different ways. Standards have transformed, and continue to transform, the way in which the National Library conducts its core business of making its digital library collections available for all to use.