Open Source at the National Library of Australia

The National Library of Australia(NLA)'s "Information Technology Strategic Plan 2006-2009" mentions several open source products.

They are using Fedora (that is Fedora the digital repository system, not Fedora the Linux implementation):

"24 The Library has been experimenting with the open source software called "Fedora", and now proposes to use Fedora to undertake the basic management functions for digital material of all kinds. Fedora has the capability to provide a solution for the deposit model of acquiring digital content."

And Lucene:

"40 The Library has decided to replace Verity Ultraseek with Lucene, a high performance, full-featured and open source search engine with strong support for features like relevance ranking and clustering of search results. The Library has already deployed Lucene to index and search the PANDORA archive, and intends to use it to support searching of the Library's website, the archive of the Australian web domain, the database of Australian newspaper content, manuscript finding aids and oral history interview transcripts."

Also they are working with IIPC on some tools:

"25 The Library is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) which comprises 11 national libraries with experience in digital archiving, together with the Internet Archive. The IIPC is working collaboratively to develop open source software specifically designed for the large-scale archiving of websites and the development of common archiving formats and protocols. The Library will upgrade the software component that manages the PANDORA archive in order to use these new tools."

IIPC have an assortment of open source tools listed:

• Heritrix, archiving web crawler, from the Internet Archive
• DeepArc, to export the database content to XML
• Web Curator Tool (WCT), for web harvesting
• BAT (BnFArcTools), API for ARC, DAT and CDX files
• NutchWAX (Nutch with Web Archive eXtensions), indexing web archives
• WERA (WEb aRchive Access), web archive search and navigation
• Xinq (XML INQuire), a search and browse for XML

The NLA "IT Architecture Project Report", March 2007, has a section on the "Open Source Development Model":

"The Library's current policy (last articulated in the 2005-2008 Strategic Plan) is:

• to base the development of services on solutions that are available in the marketplace ...

The following changes are proposed to this policy:

• To evaluate open source solutions on equal terms with solutions available in the marketplace through a rational costing process; and
• to return in-house developed software to the public domain. ..."

Also "service-oriented" gets a mention.