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Unique and Distinctive Collections (UDC) held in libraries, also known as ‘Special Collections’ contain research rich content that is unique, not digitised and difficult to access. These collections are now becoming strategically significant to our organisations, especially in the increasingly competitive academic environment where we all hold similar books and e-resources, but our unpublished content is our point of difference. UDC’s enable us to leverage research and learning opportunities, but only if they are unlocked and accessible. In 2014 the UNSW made a strategic decision to focus on and invest in the rebuilding and positioning of the UNSW Special Collections which are located at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. Prior to this the Special Collections had been largely inaccessible for a decade. This presentation gives an overview of the four year programme of activities and projects undertaken from 2014 to present, that has moved the Special Collections from a critical state into a strong position for the future. This included a focus on physical content, management and storage; building a new repository; establishing governance; and partnerships with national institutions for data sharing, digitisation, and custody of collections. The Special Collections Strategic Framework 2018-2021 (part of the UNSW 2025 Strategy) will guide future work on collecting, curating and digitising collections.

A historical perspective on the development and success of Trove, including the original idea concept, the user centric design principles and social engagement with thousands of volunteers. The Trove service which is now ten years old is used by millions of Australians with the digitised Australian newspapers being the most popular resource. Rose Holley, Special Collections Curator at UNSW Canberra discusses the findings of her research into crowdsourcing based curation. Using the digitised historic Australian Newspapers as an example, she looks at how the functionality and interface was developed in close relationship with the users, and how this led on to text correction of newspaper articles. It is nearly ten years since this pioneering project began and the motivations and achievements of the 50,000 volunteers are examined over this time. She questions how successfully the goal of improving text quality and therefore search has been achieved. She proposes that if a similar project was begun now then artificial intelligence software would be used such as OverProof post OCR correction tool to improve the quality of the text. OverProof has been trained on the manual corrections of the Australian newspaper corpus and trials demonstrate it is able to dramatically improve the quality of the corpus. Volunteer text correction could still continue afterwards for difficult text but the software would do the main donkey work, allowing users to have a better quality search.

Describes the 2 year implementation of an audiovisual archive management system and an audiovisual digital preservation system at the National Archives of Australia. The implemented system - Mediaflex will manage 1 million audiovisual items in 5 different locations. The project cost was $7 million.

Describes how Rose Holley at the National Library of Australia built and managed an online community of 40,000 people involved with old Australian Newspapers and Trove from 2008-2012.

The National Library of Australia has embraced changes in the information landscape and user expectations. It has increased its digitisation efforts, developed a single search service for Australian content and encouraged users to contribute and engage both with Australian data and the virtual community that surrounds it. The presentation showcases the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program and the Trove discovery services, taking an in depth look at the development.

An overview of the digitisation process for the Australian Women´s Weekly. Once digitised it is full-text searchable from Trove the Australian Discovery service, and this presentation highlights why the content is unique and how it can be easily searched in Trove.

Outline of Rose´s research findings into strategies libraries and archives do and should employ in order to maximise the effectiveness of ‘crowdsourcing’. Learning Objective: Understanding the value of crowdsourcing and the efficiencies gained in both information processing and information retrieval.

Describes how volunteers can help you by creating virtual exhibitions, correcting newspaper text, tagging items of interest, enhancing descriptions of items and much more by using the tools in Trove. Trove is the single discovery service for Australia.

The presentation gives an overview of the historical resources that can be found in Trove and how historians can utilise Trove to meet their research needs in Australia.

Rose is part of the RLG Social Metadata Working Group and her presentation focuses on the research and findings of this group from 2009 - 2010, particularly in relation to user contributions that enrich descriptive metadata created by libraries, archives, and museums, such as tagging, commenting and text correction.

The presentation looks at developments in online access to Art Information over the last 10 years. The first presentation with the same title was given to the ARLIS conference in 2002. This presentation draws on the 2002 vision and demonstrates how the vision is now possible with the creation of the 'Trove' discovery service. It looks in detail at how art galleries and museums can join Trove and make their collections more widely accessible online.

Stakeholders are invited to comment and provide feedback on discovery services for music in Australia, particularly in relation to the transition of 'Music Australia' service into the newly released 'Trove' search service. The content and discovery service features are explained in detail.

In late 2009 the National Library of Australia released version 1 of Trove [1] to the public. Trove is a free search engine. It searches across a large aggregation of Australian content. The treasure is over 90 million items from over 1000 libraries, museums, archives and other organisations which can be found at the click of a button. Finding information just got easier for many Australians. Exploring a wealth of resources and digital content like never before, including full-text books, journals and newspaper articles, images, music, sound, video, maps, Web sites, diaries, letters, archives, people and organisations has been an exciting adventure for users and the service has been heavily used. Finding and retrieving instantly information in context; interacting with content and social engagement are core features of the service. This article describes Trove features, usage, content building, and its applications for contributors and users in the national context.

The presentation demonstrates the features and development which have made Trove a Government 2.0 showcase. These include opening access to information, sharing and collaborating, involving users in development, and a high level of social engagement in the service.

The presentation gives an overview of the Australian Newspapers service. It contains over 20 million digitised historic newspapers. The service is now being integrated with Trove. Librarians on the panel describe how they have used the information to solve legal cases. Most of these involve family names and history including ownership of property.

The presentation demonstrates why Trove is innovative in providing access to information. It also discusses the principles of innovation for libraries.

The presentation looks at the changing role of librarians and users over the last 20 years, focusing in particular on digitisation, internet access and user engagement.

This short presentation covers the key features of Trove, a discovery service released by the National Library of Australia. In particular social engagement features, find and get items, browsing zones.

A new type of volunteer is quietly adding to the sum of knowledge of our history and heritage on the web. Ordinary Australians have helped correct millions of lines of text in the National Library of Australia's Newspapers Digitisation Program. They have contributed thousands of photographs to our national digital picture collection and helped museums like the Powerhouse identify and locate the subjects of their historical images. They have transcribed birth, death and marriage records so that they are searchable on sites like the Ryerson Index and Family Search Index. They have made thousands of out of copyright books electronically available. They have told their own stories through local websites like Mosman Memories of your street. Discover some of the most interesting projects in Australia that need the help of the public. Everyone and anyone can help by digital volunteering.

The definition and purpose of crowdsourcing and social engagement with users is discussed with particular reference to the Australian Newspapers service http://newspapers.nla.gov.au, FamilySearch http://familysearchindexing.org, Wikipedia http://wikipedia.org, the Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net, Galaxy Zoo http://www.galaxyzoo.org and The Guardian MP’s Expenses Scandal http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk. These services have harnessed thousands of digital volunteers who transcribe, create, enhance and correct text, images and archives. The successful strategies which motivated users to help, engage, and develop the outcomes will be examined. How can the lessons learnt be applied more broadly across the library and archive sector and what is the future potential? What are useful tips for crowdsourcing? Users no longer expect to be passive receivers of information and want to engage with data, each other and non-profit making organisations to help achieve what may seem to be impossible goals and targets. If libraries want to stay relevant and valued, offer high quality data and continue to have a significant social impact they must develop active engagement strategies and harness crowdsourcing techniques and partnerships to enhance their services. Can libraries respond to the shift in power and control of information and dare to give users something greater than power – freedom?

Services from the National Library of Australia including the Australian Newspapers service and the new single business service are analysed to see how far they meet the needs of Wikimedians. Power and control of information creation, description and discovery are also discussed with particular reference to the fact that public users as well as libraries now have the ability to do this.

An overview of user interactions in the Australian Newspapers service, including use of tagging, commenting and correction of OCR text. Users have enhanced the historical newspaper data adding layers of information which can be viewed and retrieved by all users.

The presentation shows how educators and students can access and use Australian Newsapers that are online.

The presentation gives an overview of the development and functionality of the Newspapers Content Management System, which was developed by the National Library of Australia to support the national Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program in 2007.

The workflows for the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program are discussed and illustrated with reference to the Newspaper Content Management system.

The presentation gives an overview of work achieved from March 2007 to November 2008 in setting up the national Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program. The public search system was released in July 2008 and this presentation gives an overview of web 2.0 features within the system, including the ability to correct OCR text.

The paper outlines the work achieved on the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation program to date (http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp). It gives an overview of the processes, methods and technologies that are being utilised in the digitisation process and illustrates with screenshots the development of appropriate infrastructure and software to support the program. Software has been developed to support the workflow, content management and delivery of data. Systems infrastructure has been developed within the context of the Library’s strategic priorities, so that rapid and easy access to both the Library’s collections and other resources can be achieved in a single business model. The service also supports a key objective of the Australian Newspaper Plan (ANPLAN http://www.nla.gov.au/anplan/) “that communities should be able to explore their rich newspaper heritage”. This program will greatly improve access for all Australian’s to historical newspapers and will give users the ability to rapidly and easily search across the newspapers in a freely publicly accessible system.

This presentation gives an overview of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program which began in February 2007 and is being led by the National Library of Australia. The program is a significant national digitisation program with a budget of $8 million dollars for the first 3 years. The scope is to digitise all Australian newspapers from 1803 - 1954 and deliver them free of charge to the public via the internet in full text searchable format.

Provides an overview of the digitisation of the Journal of the Polynesian Society, which is being processed using TEI XML and delivered in B-Engine at the University of Auckland.

The presentation describes the structure and purpose of the National Digital Project for New Zealand - Matapihi, and how the University of Auckland Library contributed as a partner to the digital collection.

This presentation outlines the digitisation framework implemented over the last 5 years at the University of Auckland. It particularly focuses on the issues and lessons learnt as a way to help guide other institutions especially archives who are currently thinking of embarking on digitisation projects but are unsure where and how to start.

Many small museums and historical societies have recently embarked on digitisation projects, or are investigating how they can make a start. Most commonly these projects involve digitisation of photographs or negatives. This paper gives a general overview of why we might want to do this, the benefits, the issues, and some tips for starting. A case study of a photograph digitisation project that was carried out at the University of Auckland is then described in detail.

Map Librarianship is facing challenging times due to the explosion of digital information. Increasingly library users are expecting access to GIS and geospatial data as well as traditional paper maps. This presents many issues to most traditional library services. Now is the time for librarians to plan ahead and make strategic decisions about the future delivery and concept of the ‘map library’. This paper discusses challenges, issues, and solutions that the University of Auckland Library has been addressing over the last 2 years in order to improve and enhance use and access to maps and geospatial data.

An overview of the University of Auckland Library, its services, facilities and budget is provided.

Recent digital developments have dramatically improved access to art information internationally, providing a wealth of resources to people across the world. At the University of Auckland this has impacted teaching methods and the way students and staff are trained in research methods and use of resources. Now that so many useful digital collections and web based resources have been established, what software solutions can we hope to find that will make searching this vast goldmine easy and productive? Many digital resources are hidden in the ‘invisible web’ so cannot be retrieved using search engines like Google. This article examines the current way the University of Auckland Library provides access to digital resources, and how this may change in the future with the latest developments in software ‘portal type’ solutions.

This presentation outlines the purpose and work of the newly appointed Digital Projects Librarian at the University of Auckland. It gives a brief overview of what digitisation is, the benefits, the stages of a digitisation project and also samples of interesting international digitisation projects and new University of Auckland Library Digitisation projects.

The paper describes the interface design process and details how customers can customise interfaces in CAIRS Library Management and Information Management systems.