It is the responsibility of the State Library of Tasmania to maintain a statewide indexing and collecting role for Tasmanian information. Tasmania Online pursues this concept in an electronic environment. It is a belief of the State Library of Tasmania that librarians should adapt their role as information specialists to the new electronic environment created by the Internet. Problems we have encountered The identification and adaptation of existing software to meet our requirements for error checking was a major step forward for us, and a vital one as our index grew beyond our ability to be maintained manually. We have automated many time consuming routines such as the generation of site statistics, the addition of new groups and retrieval of URL locations.
Procedures are now in place for managing the indexing of new sites in an orderly and methodical way.
Assigning subject headings continues to be demand driven and we need a standardised approach which could be applied by a variety of different indexers. We have instigated procedures to streamline the amount of time it takes to process clients through the publishing process. We have been able to effectively curtail the amount of time we spend with clients by encouraging them to consider aspects of their publishing before they have their initial session with us. We are also finding that an increasing number of people in the community are more confident with web publishing and the WWW than they were 12 months ago. A recurring problem we encounter is bandwidth and server demand.