Site news
Recent changes
Thursday, 11th of June, 2009
Now showing: the copyright status calculator! This uses a set of rules based on Australian copyright law, and metadata from each catalogue record, to determine whether a work is in copyright.
For more information please see this announcement.
Monday, 18th of May, 2009
We are now incorporating biographies kindly provided by the The Australian Dictionary of Biography. By clicking on an author's name, either from the search results listing or the record view page, you can see the items by that author in our collection, as well as their biography (if one is available).
We have also made a couple of changes that you might have noticed:
- Where possible, we now indicate the availability status of each item on the search results listing page.
- We have added more full-text resources from Open Library, increasing our number of searchable full-text items to over 750,000.
Our thanks as always for your feedback and ideas! Please don't hesitate to get in touch via the feedback form.
Wednesday, 25th of March, 2009
We've extended our full-text searching to also search across material held by Open Library. This extends our searchable full-text items to more than half a million. We've also added in "next" and "previous" buttons to allow you to browse through all full-text results.
Monday, 16th of February, 2009
Our integration of full-text resources has been extended to include material from Hathi Trust as well as Project Gutenberg. You don't need to do anything special to search these sources: relevant hits will be automatically shown below the "From our finding aids" box on the search results listing.
Please see the help topic for more information.
Monday, 2nd of February, 2009
We have just added integration with Project Gutenberg. When you search the Catalogue, possibly relevant hits from Project Gutenberg are shown to the right of the page.
Thursday, 22nd of January, 2009
We've just added a new version of subjects browse. Thanks as always for all of your feedback, and please contact us if you have any thoughts on how the Library's Catalogue might be improved.
Monday, 19th of January, 2009
Belated wishes for the New Year from the Library's Catalogue team. We've been working on a few new features that draw on other information sources the Library has at its disposal. Some people will be excited about recent work done with our authority data, and there's more to come.
But today's news is about the Library's finding aids. Finding aids are created to provide extra information about archival collection items, like personal papers and letters. Now, whenever you do a search on our catalogue, we will also search our finding aids for relevant pages. You can find these links under the "Narrow Search" box on the right hand side of the search results. Here's an example!
Tuesday, 7th of October, 2008
Is this thing on?
Yes, we're still here, and we've added a few new bits and pieces:
- Improved Wikipedia integration to incorporate information about your favourite authors.
- Improved Google Books integration to allow you to see full-text previews from Google Books without leaving the record you're viewing.
Friday, 22nd of August, 2008
It's been a while since our last major update, but we now have some new features to share:
- More cover art in our search listings, sourced from Google and our Online Shop to complement the ones already sourced from our own Digital Collection.
- User lists allow our registered users to create and share annotated lists of records in our catalogue.
- New favourites functions including grouping, annotations an bulk export.
Monday, 14th of July, 2008
We've been quietly beavering away and have added a handful of new things:
- User preferences! By clicking the "Preferences" link you can now selectively enable new features, including callnumber display, automatic logout, persistent search settings, and more.
- Next/previous record buttons
- Enhanced callnumber browse to show extended information when browsing by callnumber.
Thanks as always for all of your feedback!
Monday, 9th of June, 2008
What's new, pussycat? (bad music, bad catalogue puns, where does it end?!). Find items the Library has recently added to the collection. Vary the timeframe between the current week and the last 6 years.
As with all searches, this list of new items is also RSS-enabled, meaning you
can subscribe to the feed of weekly additions and keep up to date with our recent acquisitions. Look for the RSS
logo at the bottom of the page:
Wednesday, 14th of May, 2008
Buy it! When our online shop has a copy of an item, we'll let you know and give a direct link to buy it. Some examples:
- Cook's Endeavour journal: the inside story
- Seed cake and honey prawns: fashion and fad in Australian food
- Alan Moorehead: a rediscovery
These records usually have a nice big book cover image as well - very pretty!
Saturday, 10th of May, 2008
Now showing:
- A new Advanced Search page
- Multiple formats per item, allowing more powerful format-based searching and narrowing
Tuesday, 15th of April, 2008
All things that are new and exciting:
- More relevance ranking improvements
- Browse indexes!
- More improvements to the record display
Wednesday, 9th of April, 2008
We've just finished cleaning up our record display code and along the way have tweaked the LibraryThing tags and introduced some additional information from LibraryThing where available. We're also making use of image cover art from Google Books; check it out.
Friday, 4th of April, 2008
Although we haven't updated this list for a month, we've been quietly rolling out some new features:
- Huge improvements to relevance ranking for those hard to find items: The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Bulletin, Nature and Science and many others now only a search away
- Records with non-Latin scripts are now viewable and searchable
- Improvements to the display of holdings data
- Tags from LibraryThing
- "See a preview" button linking to full-text or previews from Google Books where available
Coming very soon:
- Browse indexes
- More relevance ranking improvements
- More flexible format definitions
- Improvements to the record view display
Thanks for all your feedback! Please keep sending it our way and we'll continue to incorporate your suggestions.
Tuesday, 4th of March, 2008
Good news! We've got a whole bunch of new features:
- Many improvements to relevance ranking
- Support for abbreviations when searching (NSW = New South Wales, 1st = first, etc)
- Changes to the record view display
- Result set sorting
- Search within date ranges via the Advanced Search
- Simple links for navigating collections (See the 'Related records' link of the Hurley negative collection for an example)
- Searching for persistent identifiers now works (e.g. nla.pic-an23379266)
- Shinier buttons
- Improved APA, MLA citation formats, and introducing the Australian citation format
- Introducing EndNote, BibTex and RDF export formats (available from the citation screen)
As always, we would love to hear from you if you have any comments or suggestions.
Tuesday, 5th of February, 2008
More changes to relevance ranking, this time to fix an issue where records containing search terms in their former title would be consistently ranked more highly than records with the terms in their current title.
Monday, 4th of February, 2008
Modified relevance ranking for fielded queries (such as title and author searches) to favour hits where the search terms appear in close proximity to one another. Previously it was possible for a search for an exact title match to be ranked more lowly than hits that contained the search terms across multiple fields. This change avoids this scenario by giving an additional relevance boost to hits that are near or exact matches.
Improved record printing capabilities.
Thursday, 31st of January, 2008
Added support for emailing the contents of a record to a designated email address. Better support for printing record data should follow shortly.
Tuesday, 22nd of January, 2008
For records with multiple linked electronic resources, multiple hyperlinks are now shown in the search results listing.
Sunday, 13th of January, 2008
Many small user interface tweaks.
Friday, 11th of January, 2008
Improved phrase searching to give better results when searching on exact terms. This should give better results when searching for an exact title or author.
Monday, 24th of December, 2007
Lots of changes to the search indexes to allow better searching on titles and subjects. Also added support for deleting user comments.

