National Library to refresh IT infrastructure

The National Library of Australia (NLA) will refresh its IT infrastructure over a period of four years to keep pace with the growth in digital assets it manages.

In an expression of interest released today, the library is planning a staged delivery of new systems and infrastructure from January 2012 until December 2015.

“In the context of its digital collecting, the Library seeks solutions to achieving suitable, scalable and sustainable digital library infrastructure,” according to the NLA.

The investment is intended to enable the scale-up of the NLA’s collecting of digital materials and to support a “full spectrum” of collection workflows.

IT infrastructure demands are rapidly increasing at the NLA. At the CIO Summit in July last year the library’s head of information technology, Mark Corbould, said the NLA had about half a billion Web server requests across all of its online assets including the public catalogue and the Trove search engine in 2006, which rose to more than 2.5 billion in 2009.

Corbould said the library does a lot of work with open source software to develop and manage its archives and Trove was developed with various open source components. The NLA has a long history of using open source software to manage its information collection in addition to standard infrastructure and network services.

Earlier this year the Trove search engine was updated to version 4.0.

This latest project, to be managed by the library’s collection infrastructure director David Wong, will also be aimed at ensuring ongoing access to digital materials and manage content and metadata in an “efficient, reliable, sustainable, maintainable and accountable manner”.

The library is looking to support “efficient, user-centric content delivery” and improved business workflow efficiencies.

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