Presto shines for Transport eLibrary
Presto shines for Transport eLibrary
August 28, 2009:The Transport Education eLibrary, a new online facility established at www.transportlibrary.com.au, uses Inmagic Presto software to provide access to a growing number of documents and resources.
The Transport and Logistics Industry Skills Council (TLISC) is one of 11 national organisations that have a key role in advising government on national industry skill requirements, and providing advice to industry around national workforce planning initiatives, training package development and the national vocational education training system.
The Transport and Logistics sector which covers Road Transport, Rail, Warehouse & Storage, Maritime and Aviation in Australia employs an estimated 500,000 individuals directly and over 1 million people in both direct and associated roles.
The Transport Education eLibrary was produced with the assistance of funding provided by the Commonwealth Government through the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.While primarily focussed on consolidating information regarding people and skills in Transport and Logistics, the eLibrary also contains information about all aspects of the T&L Industry, as well as a broad range of information related to Vocational Education and Training.
Amanda Thomas, Director, Research and Policy at TLISC, said before the eLibrary was established “we placed reports on our Web site. It was a list of document titles and people could only download the document. They were not searchable, and it was not usual for them to have summaries. Also owing to space constraints we tended only to list very key documents.
“Users downloaded directly from the Web site. Mostly we tried to get soft copy from the original source, but in some cases we scanned documents. This resulted in documents that were extremely large, which caused issues for users trying to download them.”
Inmagic describes Presto as a "social knowledge management platform" that enables the creation of social knowledge networks which integrate content management, publishing, access, and social management tools. These were exactly the features that TLISC was seeking for the eLibrary.
The advanced search in the full text of the documents provides a way for users to locate exactly the materials they need. Items found can be emailed to users after they are found or saved or downloaded directly to a desktop as PDF, HTML or XML. End users can define alerts based on system or user events, or on a search query.Amanda and the CEO of TLISC conducted web research independently of each other over a two month period to identify options for establishing the eLibrary.
“Most of the products we came across were aimed either at traditional “book” libraries, or else were part of a larger business management product. We are a not for profit organisation, that operates as a small business so the additional features of these larger tools were of no interest to us. Also, once we found Presto, it was difficult to be satisfied with products that offered less functionality.”
Now that the Presto installation has been moved to an outsourced service, hosted by Maxus Australia, TLISC will be moving to take advantage of Presto’s Web 2.0 features, such as rating, and commenting.Other resource formats will also be incorporated, and the user base extended to more users, who will be able to register through the TLISC web site.