Strategic priority 3 - Transform search and navigation
We’re investing to open up access to the collection. We’ll accelerate the modernisation and improvement of the ways in which users find what they need in our collection and in linked resources held by partner organisations. We’ll enrich our catalogues and make incoming items available as quickly and efficiently as possible. We’ll use new information retrieval technologies to enhance the search possibilities offered to our users, so they can trawl our online resources at the deepest level. Users will benefit from faster, targeted results, which are comprehensive in their breadth and depth.
Key area - Adopt new resource discovery technologies
Actions and benefits
- Play a leading role in developing new resource discovery tools tailored to researchers’ needs.
- Harness the traffic and capabilities of popular search engines to help researchers discover Library content.
- Use information retrieval technologies, including search engines, content classification and text mining, to create rich navigation and access at levels unavailable through traditional catalogues. We’ll create the technical infrastructure to help users link between the Library’s traditional and electronic collections.
Key area - Aim for best practice in our catalogues
Actions and benefits
- Progress towards an integrated online catalogue for all our holdings. The Integrated Catalogue will incorporate, for example, our archives, manuscripts, sound resources and all our early printed books.
- Define clear standards for the type and quality of cataloguing information needed to find and manage collection items, including those in new and emerging digital formats.
- Improve the quality and consistency of metadata in our catalogues.
Key area - Embed efficiencies in our handling of incoming materials
Actions and benefits
- Exploit the opportunities generated by our new integrated processing system to streamline our procedures for ordering, acquiring, cataloguing and shelving material.
- Implement a new approach to metadata sourcing and quality control using the most effective elements of automated and manual techniques, for example by improving links with publishers and the information supply chain to capture metadata as items are acquired.
