Liz Holliday, Tasmania Online, State Library of Tasmania, 91 Murray St Hobart, TAS 7000, Australia. Phone 03 62 337503 Fax 03 62 334955 Liz.Clark@central.tased.edu.au Tasmania Online Home Page
Tasmania Online is a comprehensive state-wide index of all web sites in Tasmania. We have also assisted over one hundred non-profit community groups to publish WWW pages. This article describes the evolution of the Tasmania Online service over the past eighteen months.It describes some problems we have encountered and overcome as well as looking at future directions.
The aim of the project was to provide a comprehensive index to Tasmanian content on the WWW. At the same time the State Library sought to enable community groups to publish on the WWW, both to spread the use of web publishing skills in the community and to encourage community use of the Internet as a publishing and information resource.We now offer a statewide service with three full-time staff in Hobart, and one full-time equivalent shared between Launceston, Devonport and Burnie.
Because we have this comprehensive state-wide focus we are able to provide a service which we believe is unique to WWW publishing, which is a comprehensive search service for the state of Tasmania on the WWW. While it may be impossible to index the Internet in a large state we believe given the small size of Tasmania it is possible to index it here.
Tasmania is ideally suited to fully utilise the WWW as Tasmanian businesses and organisations have many problems associated with their isolation which the WWW is able to address.
We find that local organisations are enthusiastic about the potential for communication with their national and international counterparts that the WWW allows them.This has been evidenced by the fact that demand for our service has continued to grow. We have enabled over 100 non-profit community organisations over the past fifteen months to have a web presence.
It is the responsibility of the State Library of Tasmania to maintain a statewide indexing and collecting role for Tasmanian information. Tasmania Online pursues this concept in an electronic environment.
It is a belief of the State Library of Tasmania that librarians should adapt their role as information specialists to the new electronic environment created by the Internet.
We have automated many time consuming routines such as the generation of site statistics, the addition of new groups and retrieval of URL locations.
Procedures are now in place for managing the indexing of new sites in an orderly and methodical way. Assigning subject headings continues to be demand driven and we need a standardised approach which could be applied by a variety of different indexers.
We have instigated procedures to streamline the amount of time it takes to process clients through the publishing process. We have been able to effectively curtail the amount of time we spend with clients by encouraging them to consider aspects of their publishing before they have their initial session with us. We are also finding that an increasing number of people in the community are more confident with web publishing and the WWW than they were 12 months ago.
A recurring problem we encounter is bandwidth and server demand.
The State Library of Tasmania is now in a position to provide expertise for this initiative in ways that would not have been possible eighteen months ago. Tasmania Online expects to be heavily involved in the development and use of metadata within the state and specific projects are now underway. We are also optimistic that we will expand our role as a coordinator of government information.
We want to share the skills that we have developed in our work on Tasmania Online with the rest of the State Library of Tasmania because we belive that skills with the Internet should be a part of every librarians abilities.
Liz Holliday, © 1997. The author assigns to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grants a non-exclusive license to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.