Site news

We're constantly working on many aspects of this prototype. In addition to our work to incorporate your feedback, here are some of the areas we are considering for the future:

• Tweaking the "favourites" area, perhaps with grouping and group-based operations, like publish, cite, export
• Improving how you can work with search results
• Improving callnumber searching
• Improving the new items showcase

Recent changes

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.