[LINK] NLA IT Plan 2006-2009 & 2007 IT Architecture Project Report

[Tom Worthington]

At 09:08 AM 3/04/2007, Anthony Hornby wrote:
>... interesting reading. ... Plenty of proposed use of and support 
>for open source products in there. ...

Yes the NLA's "Information Technology Strategic Plan 2006-2009" 
mentions several open source products 
<http://www.nla.gov.au/policy/documents/itplan.pdf>.

They are using Fedora (that is Fedora the digital repository system 
<http://www.fedora.info/>, not Fedora the Linux implementation):

"24 The Library has been experimenting with the open source software 
called "Fedora", and now proposes to use Fedora to undertake the 
basic management functions for digital material of all kinds. Fedora 
has the capability to provide a solution for the deposit model of 
acquiring digital content."

And Lucene <http://lucene.apache.org/>:

"40 The Library has decided to replace Verity Ultraseek with Lucene, 
a high performance, full-featured and open source search engine with 
strong support for features like relevance ranking and clustering of 
search results. The Library has already deployed Lucene to index and 
search the PANDORA archive, and intends to use it to support 
searching of the Library's website, the archive of the Australian web 
domain, the database of Australian newspaper content, manuscript 
finding aids and oral history interview transcripts."

Also they are working with IIPC on some tools <http://netpreserve.org/>:

"25 The Library is a member of the International Internet 
Preservation Consortium (IIPC) which comprises 11 national libraries 
with experience in digital archiving, together with the Internet 
Archive. The IIPC is working collaboratively to develop open source 
software specifically designed for the large-scale archiving of 
websites and the development of common archiving formats and 
protocols. The Library will upgrade the software component that 
manages the PANDORA archive in order to use these new tools."

IIP have an assortment of open source tools listed at 
<http://netpreserve.org/software/downloads.php>:

* Heritrix, archiving web crawler, from the Internet Archive : 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/archive-crawler
* DeepArc, to export the database content to XML: 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/deeparc/
* Web Curator Tool (WCT), for web harvesting: 
http://webcurator.sourceforge.net/
* BAT (BnFArcTools), API for ARC, DAT and CDX files: 
http://bibnum.bnf.fr/downloads/bat/
* NutchWAX (Nutch with Web Archive eXtensions), indexing web 
archives: http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/projects/nutch/
* WERA (WEb aRchive Access), web archive search and navigation: 
http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/projects/wera/
* Xinq (XML INQuire), a search and browse for XML: http://www.nla.gov.au/xinq/

The NLA "IT Architecture Project Report", March 2007, has a section 
on the "Open Source Development Model" 
<http://www.nla.gov.au/dsp/documents/itag.pdf>:

"The Library's current policy (last articulated in the 2005-2008 
Strategic Plan) is:
* to base the development of services on solutions that are available 
in the marketplace ...
The following changes are proposed to this policy:
* to evaluate open source solutions on equal terms with solutions 
available in the
marketplace through a rational costing process; and
* to return in-house developed software to the public domain. ..."

Also "service-oriented" gets a mention.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml