Work with appropriate in-house people on the upcoming Public Programmes (the programmes being offered to the general public once the library is reopened, e.g., Lifelines, as part of the National Library’s New Generation Strategy) and describe on my blog the various links between this public ‘front-of-house’ work and the regular work I do behind the scenes in cataloguing and indexing, giving examples of how each effects the other.
BOK 5 - Organisation, Retrieval & Conservation of Information.
BOK 7 - Information & Communication Technologies.
As a way for the library to introduce members of the general public to the collections the 'Lifelines' concept was developed. It is an interactive touchscreen tabletop computer that allows visitors (both on site and online) to start interacting on a meaningful, yet not too overwhelming level, with the collections, building up their own personal exhibition of articles, photos and ephemera related to themselves. There are three suggestions - a year, a surname and a place as ways to begin the interaction.
In terms of the link between this and my indexing work there is every chance that a newspaper or journal article indexed by INNZ will come up as part of a user's search on Lifelines, and in order for this to happen the search terms that we use on INNZ need to match the likely search terms used by the user. INNZ allows this by the use of an abstract in which is written a description of the item using words and subject terms not found in the FAST database terms we use as descriptors. Most FAST terms work but not all are NZ-appropriate and we need to be aware of what terms are less likely to be considered by our users and cover them off in the abstract. The use of Te Reo terms is also important to cover off for those users who are likely to use Maori language terms as part of their searching strategies on INNZ.
The more successful hits made by users on the Lifelines interface, the more use will be made of it, the more need for indexed information.
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