[LINK] Fwd: Launch of Australian Screen Online

[Tom Worthington]

At 03:12 PM 20/07/2007, Stephen Loosley wrote:
>... The Australian Screen Online website 
><http://australianscreen.com.au/> was launched this week in Sydney, 
>giving the general public access to all of Australia's cinematic 
>history with over 500 film and television programs represented on the site. ...

Good content. The site doesn't just have old films, but includes 
clips from relatively recent ones, such as Ten Canoes 
<http://australianscreen.com.au/titles/ten-canoes/>. However, the 
popularity overloaded the site it initially. The developers have made 
some changes to speed up the site and it seems to be working better 
now. Contrary to media reports the developers say they are improving 
the efficiency of the server, rather than buying more hardware.

It happens that I was talking with staff at the National Film and 
Sound archive before the launch and warned them there was likely to 
be a problem with the new web site. A similar problem had occurred 
with the UK based "Aerial Reconnaissance Archives" in 2004. There was 
a discussion of the issues on Link: 
<http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2004-January/054572.html>.

The UK designers had made the job for their server particularly 
difficult by giving every image on the site a different URL for each 
person who looked at it. This made sense for tracking use of the 
valuable historical photos, but not when applied to to the logos on 
the home page. It made it impossible to cache the images. When the 
BBC ran a news item about the site the server was overloaded. Fixing 
the URLs for the images on the main pages seemed to help.

A similar problem occurred with the Sentinel fire tracking system 
which the Australian Government launched a few days before bushfires 
in Canberra in 2003 <http://www.tomw.net.au/2003/enet.html>. When the 
fires broke out the system became overloaded. A separate server with 
userids and passwords for firefighters was installed, but I also 
suggested putting some canned output from the system for the general 
public to look at. The canned output could be cached and did not tie 
up the database server generating a new map for each user.

In the case of the film archive I suggested offering fewer films per 
web page. They might also change the default setting for the media 
player from Broadband to Dialup and so it does not start downloading 
content by default. At present the media player will start 
downloading the broadband content as soon as you go to a clip web 
page, in anticipation you want to play it. If you don't want to play 
it, or want to dialup version, that is a waste.

They could also modify the logos of participating organisations to 
save a little of the load on the server. The Commonwealth Arms has 
not been optimized for online use 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2003/epolicy.html#edocs>. But you have to be 
careful with what you do with the Commonwealth Arms, as there are 
strict guidelines 
<http://www.pmc.gov.au/guidelines/commonwealth_coat_arms.cfm>.  I 
once had to tell the staff of a government minister that they 
couldn't have the commonwealth arms as a background pattern on the 
minister's web page. Sticking the MPs face over the top of the 
pre-eminent symbol of the power and authority of the Commonwealth 
Government did not seem to be appropriate.



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