Annual report 2005/06

Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2006
ISSN 0311-449X

Output 1.2 : Library, information services to support policy advice and publications

Objectives

Information Services delivers programs and services to meet the Minister's expectations relating to dissemination of information about AIC research. The objectives of the Information Services group are:

• to ensure that AIC researchers maintain their competitive edge through access to the most up to date and relevant information
• to facilitate AIC access to and management of corporate information and research data
• to provide our stakeholders with information about the work and output of the AIC and a gateway to the wider world of crime and criminal justice information.

Core activities include:

• website services
• JV Barry Library services
• data services
• CINCH database of Australian crime and criminal justice information
• contributions to Australian and international information networks.

Website services

AIC website

The Institute's website (http://www.aic.gov.au) is the principal vehicle for the Institute to meet the Minister's expectation of wide dissemination of the results of AIC-conducted and CRC-funded research. It provides information about the work of the Institute and the Criminology Research Council, and acts as a gateway to information on crime and criminal justice in Australia.

Over the past financial year the website has been used more interactively to support the research program, particularly with the installation of web based survey software. This software has been used in several Institute research projects, as well as to invite comment on Institute communications activities as part of the communications review. It was successfully used to collect data for research into fisheries crime, sexual assault in non-English speaking communities, and sexual assault in Indigenous communities.

The previous year's work in enhancing the user focus of the website continued with the redesign of the publications area of the website. Web users are now first presented with a subject index to Institute publications, bringing together all publications on a particular topic.

Reflecting the Institute's work in this area, a new automatically updated bibliography on specialist courts has been added to the website, joining those on arson and the link between drugs and property crime.

New subject sections have been added to the website, with links to Institute and other valuable sources on:

• women and crime (http://www.aic.gov.au/topics/women/)
• practical guides to crime prevention (http://www.aic.gov.au/research/cvp/guides.html)
• robbery (http://www.aic.gov.au/topics/violence/robbery/)
• environmental crime (http://www.aic.gov.au/topics/environment/)

Use of the website

During the 2005-06 financial year there was an average of almost 30,000 successful requests for pages per day from external search engines, with a high of 38,550 occurring in March. The months with highest usage coincide with the end of the Australian and northern hemisphere academic years. The majority of requests (61%) are for AIC publications. The most requested AIC publication during the year was Australian crime: facts and figures 2005.

External searching, described above, leads people to the website. Searching within the site uses the website's search engine, Funnelback. Use fluctuates throughout the year, with an average of 19,398 successful queries per month.

Other websites

To improve the operating efficiency of the AIC Board and the Criminology Research Council, meeting papers and minutes are now posted to a closed website. This has considerably reduced the printing and distribution overheads for these meetings.

The annual colloquium of the International Council on Crime Prevention will be held in Canberra later in 2006. As part of the AIC's role, the web team has established the official website for the meeting (http://colloquium2006.info/).

Information Services has played a role in the development of the web based crime prevention forum and project register which will facilitate information exchange among practitioners.

A similar project is under way for the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General in Indigenous justice. In collaboration with NSW Attorney General's Department, the Information Services section has been developing a website providing a resource directory and discussion forum and digests of information about topics of interest to the practitioners and policy makers in the field. Once this is operational, Information Services will continue to maintain it.

Information Services also maintains a protected section on the website for DUMA stakeholders.

On a fee-for-service basis, the Institute has taken over, redesigned and now maintains the website of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology. The Institute also maintains a website for the Australasian Police Multicultural Advisory Bureau.

Intranet

Information Services continues to develop the intranet as the main knowledge sharing and development vehicle for the Institute, particularly for the uniform promulgation of policies, procedures and guidelines and for information about the Institute's work to meet its governance commitments to the Minister. In the past year there has been an emphasis on supporting internal committees, with the online provision of relevant information and minutes to committee members.

Another activity in this area has been the development of an inventory tool for Institute publications, so that an accurate picture of sales and distribution can be established, leading to improvements in publications planning, as well as the identification of popular current issues.

All areas continue to develop their policies, procedures and guidelines and to make them available via the intranet. Linkages between the Institute's document management system and the intranet ensure that staff have the current version of these documents at their fingertips.

JV Barry Library services

Client services

Library staff continued to work in collaboration with Institute researchers to ensure that their work reflects current, reliable and relevant information available in the public domain. This is done by providing both literature searching and current awareness services. Library staff take an active interest in research projects so that newly published material can be brought to individual researchers' attention. The library also undertakes tailored literature searches and other reference work to support individual research projects.

Current awareness alerts continue to be produced on crime prevention, cybercrime, drugs, evaluation, Indigenous justice, juvenile justice, and people trafficking and smuggling. A new alert, on recidivism, was in development at the end of the year in review. Although produced primarily for agency staff, these alerts are also available to stakeholders, as part of the Minister's expectation that the Institute will distribute information widely. The library also introduced a monthly in-house alert of new material about crime and criminal justice in Australia as part of the CINCH updating process.

Information Services contributes to two of the Institute's monitoring programs, Deaths in Custody and the National Homicide Monitoring Program, and to a cybercrime project by finding and storing news articles on these topics. In addition it maintains files of newspaper articles about the Institute so that our media impact can be monitored. This was reported in the Public Affairs section of this report.

Major reference work was undertaken during the year to support research projects on tax compliance, drugs and homicide, illicit markets, federal offenders and offences, sexual violence reporting in culturally and linguistically diverse and Indigenous communities, diversion of Indigenous offenders, armed guards, recidivism, non-custodial sentences, clandestine drug laboratories, intellectual property, corruption, human trafficking, and missing persons.

The library's data officer uses the wealth of statistical information available within the Institute and from external sources to ensure that researchers have the most up to date information at their disposal. Much of the work undertaken in this area is used on the AIC website and in the Crime facts info and Australian crime: facts & figures publications. The library uses this work to provide limited information services to inquiries from the public.

The library provides some support to stakeholders and the public, as resources permit. Information was provided to stakeholders on homicide locations, fear of crime, juvenile detention, criminal careers of juveniles, sentencing Indigenous offenders, police numbers and crime rates, Indigenous prisoners, older people as victims of crime, domestic violence statistics, mental illness and offending. Averages of 17 stakeholder and 36 public inquiries are answered each month. These are monitored to identify frequently requested topics so that ongoing demand can be met with the publication of specific information on the website.

CINCH database

The CINCH bibliographic database, compiled and maintained by Information Services, is one of the Institute's activities to meet the Minister's expectations about the dissemination of information about crime and criminal justice in Australia. The database is one of the family of index databases for which access is provided by Informit (see http://informit.com.au for more information). CINCH aims to include all new material about crime and criminal justice in Australasia - books, reports, journal articles, websites, conference proceedings and papers - with high quality subject indexing and abstracts. CINCH records are also available in the JV Barry Library's catalogue on the Institute website.

At the end of June 2006, the database contained 52,409 records. During the year 1,607 records were added, compared with 1,734 records for the previous year. The contractor for indexing for the CINCH database is Informed Sources Pty Ltd.

Data services

The Institute acquires or creates datasets for many of its research projects, and these are all captured and made available to Institute staff using the integrated library management system. The data collected can be leveraged to deliver other client data services where appropriate, and will be used for further analysis in future research projects.

The data officer updates the statistics and commentary for Australian crime: facts & figures. This is a widely distributed annual print publication and usually the most frequently accessed section of the website. As statistics are released throughout the year, the website statistics section is also updated, to ensure that the website is kept up to date with current information.

Collection

Thanks to a program of business process redesign undertaken in the previous financial year, the library is now able to process all new material in-house, with a contractor providing indexing and abstract services for the CINCH database.

During the year 729 monographs were acquired in print or electronic format. Of these, 513 were gratis or exchange items and 216 were purchased. In the previous year, 967 monographs were received; 809 being gratis or exchange items and 158 purchased. The smaller intake reflects both a sharper focus in collecting and resource constraints.

The library's database now contains several material types - research projects, datasets, policies, procedures and even portable ICT equipment. The integrated library management system is used for records in the Institute's knowledge base and provides links to it through the intranet.

The Institute has continued to make a significant cataloguing contribution to the National Library service, Libraries Australia. This service replaced an earlier system, Kinetica, on 30 November 2005. Libraries Australia is an internet based service that plays an essential part in the operation of hundreds of Australian libraries, facilitates the creation and sharing of quality cataloguing data for library materials, acts as the central resource in an efficient interlibrary loans service, and supports the provision of reference services. It provides access to the national database of material held in Australian libraries, known as the Australian National Bibliographic Database.

Despite problems experienced by the National Library with processing contributions, the Institute continues to send a monthly batch of electronic records to Libraries Australia for addition. These records are then either matched to existing records and a holding record added, or a new catalogue entry is created.

This year the JV Barry Library contributed 605 cataloguing records to Libraries Australia. In the previous year, 547 original cataloguing records had been created, and holdings were added to 889 records.

Interlibrary loans

The library provides loans, interlibrary loans and document delivery services founded on partnerships and interlibrary cooperation. These activities enable the library to deliver publications, documents and information to AIC staff that are not available in the Institute's own collection. The library continues to actively support cooperative interlibrary lending schemes and utilises the National Library of Australia's Libraries Australia document delivery service for the rest of its interlibrary loans work. Full text fee for service databases are increasingly used for recent journal articles.

During the year the library received 403 journal articles and 41 books on interlibrary loan for researchers, and made 613 articles and 279 books available on interlibrary loan. Staff borrowed 759 books, reports and journal issues, compared with 876 the previous year. The decrease in loans to staff reflects the increasing availability of material in electronic format. There continues to be a decline in some of these figures, reflecting the increasing availability of public domain and paid electronic documents on the intranet and internet. The number of articles acquired on interlibrary loan for AIC researchers is rising however, reflecting increased use of all library services and the wider range of subjects being researched, for example, fisheries, an area in which the library has limited holdings.

Contributions and networks

During the year the JV Barry Library, in collaboration with the AFP Library, created an online discussion list, Community of Practice for Information on Crime in the Asia Pacific, or copicap. Libraries from police, justice and corrections agencies are members, and the list acts as a forum for discussion of common issues and the dissemination of information from members. This is one of the vehicles for distribution of information about new AIC publications.

Information Services also contributes news to the Crimnet list of criminal justice researchers, practitioners and policy makers about new AIC reports and activities, and important news from Australia and overseas. Other discussion lists to which contributions are made cover Indigenous affairs, Australian policy, and international crime prevention.

The Institute is an active member of the World Criminal Justice Libraries Network. The Manager of Information Services presented a paper at this group's biennial meeting in Montreal in June on the Institute's knowledge sharing and management work. The Institute is a member of the planning committee for the next meeting, in 2008.

The Institute continues to build relationships with the emergency management sector through involvement with the Australian Libraries in Emergency Services (ALIES) group, and is also a member of the planning committee for its meeting in 2007. This group works closely with the Australian Disasters Information Network (AusDIN) group, coordinated by the Australian Government Attorney-General's Department.

Cooperative interlibrary loan networks to which the library belongs include ALIES, Gratisnet (health libraries), GLASS (social sciences libraries) and the group of government criminal justice agency libraries in Australia.

The JV Barry Library continued to assist the Papua New Guinea Attorney-General's Department by identifying criminal justice and criminological material in Australia to build and supplement the existing collection in the Department's library in Papua New Guinea. The PNG library nominates material it would like to receive and the JV Barry Library packs and ships this up to three times each year.

Presentations and staff development

Information Services staff presented papers at the 2nd Australian Government Libraries Information Network conference in July, the 3rd International Evidence Based Librarianship conference in October, and the 9th World Criminal Justice Libraries Network conference in June.

Information Services outputs 2005-06

• updating and publication of Australian crime: facts and figures 2005
• preparation of 25 Crime Facts Info fact sheets
• updated statistics pages on AIC website
• new searchable specialty courts database on AIC website; regularly updated arson, and drugs and property crime databases
• 1607 records added to CINCH
• 97 AIC policies, procedures and guidelines added to intranet or updated
• 21 AIC research projects added to intranet
• 28 AIC staff presentations added to intranet
• 15 AIC roundtables added to intranet
• daily press monitoring for NHMP and NDICP
• APMAB and ANZSOC websites maintained
• national and international links supported, with new discussion forum, copicap
• over 40 expanded and updated criminology topics on website.

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