Case study: NSW Parliament
Koha and DSpace in the NSW Parliamentary Library
When the Parliamentary Library of New South Wales began using Koha as its Library Management system and DSpace as its digital repository, the staff didn't do so to make a political statement about the viability of open source software. “This was just the software that fulfilled our requirements,” said Deborah Brown, Parliament’s chief librarian.
While having a physical collection, NSW Parliament library's lifeblood is digitized news media. Through their parliamentary copyright exemption they reproduce and store dozens of articles each day for the use of the Members of Parliament (and their staff) who make up their user base.
When their MPs are sitting for parliamentary sessions many of them are far from their constituencies, so it’s essential to have a reliable source of news clippings from the regional papers covering their ridings. The library has a service that scans for mentions of all the Members' names in the regional papers, and digital fulltext versions of those articles are stored in DSpace to ensure their accessibility so the Members can keep up to date with policy development research.
While that's an automated process, the library also has a staff-member dedicated to scanning the seven metropolitan newspapers for topically relevant articles to see what's being recorded about what the public is thinking. These articles are digitally clipped and catalogued and put into the repository, as are the various Media Releases put out by parliamentarians (the NSW Parliamentary library is the state’s only centralized collection of those electronic Media Releases).
To handle these requirements (as well as their physical collection) the library has been using a digital repository combined with library management software since 1997, but 2010 and 2011 saw their shift to Koha and DSpace. The division of tasks, which is maintained in their current open source implementation, has Koha storing the detailed metadata in bibliographic records, while DSpace stores digital entities themselves with “just enough metadata to get by.” The idea is to leave DSpace invisibly in the background so users do most of their interaction with Koha. When an item is loaded into DSpace it also gets loaded into Koha for detailed cataloguing, and electronic documents can be loaded into DSpace through Koha.
Integrating the two approaches has taken some time (and money) to implement, but now that both are up and running newsclippings can be imported, get indexed, and have authorized subject headings applied all in a timely manner. Some of these subject headings, like the various dates and names, are automatically generated from the externally provided electronic clippings files, but a librarian does the more advanced subject heading work as part of the standard workflow. This created a challenge in dealing with Koha, which was designed for working with books and in much smaller quantities. Making the workflow for fast subject cataloguing of the flood of news articles took some time to solve, but their service provider came up with a customized newsloader approach using some clever Ajax programming.
There were some other technical challenges to implementing their new systems. Because the old system had a very “agricultural” process to load clippings into the various systems it was difficult to see exactly how long each of these tasks were taking. Koha and DSpace, having a much more streamlined process exposed some technical issues that would have been good to have benchmarks from the past to compare with. Also, in the process of doing such a major upgrade, the library was interrogating its data very thoroughly and discovering the data entry sins of the past dozen years.
Moving into the future, the library sees end user education as the biggest challenge. Teaching about the effectiveness of current awareness tools like RSS feeds for parliamentarians is a prime example. Deborah Brown sees the future as moving towards more self-service for the basics of finding information. Adding value and packaging information up for Parliamentarians who, as clients go, are time-poor information hounds is a challenge that has no endpoint, but one they feel confident in facing.