NLA to expand online and mobile services

1 October 2014 Books+Publishing

The National Library of Australia (NLA) is redeveloping infrastructure to manage its digital collections and expanding its online and mobile services for library users, reports CIO Australia.

NLA assistant director-general for resource sharing Marie-Louise Ayres said the library is focussed on making its digital collections more readily available for people in their personal space.

‘For someone to find a piece of music on Twitter, we needed to have acquired it, catalogued it, digitised it. And then we needed to free the content from its institutional backyard,’ said Ayers.

Ayres says that the library’s digital assets now exceed 3 petabytes. ‘Libraries are some of the earliest adopters of digital technology. Preserving Australia’s national digital heritage is a core priority.’

The NLA currently manages its digital collections in its own data centre, but is considering options for using external cloud services in the future.

‘The cloud may offer cost-savings, but there are concerns about privacy or cross-border data sovereignty,’ said Ayres.

Category: Library news