Content or creator is Australian, but the original items and their digital surrogates may reside anywhere in the world. Distributed responsibilities In PictureAustralia, activities associated with management and preservation of collections remain with the image providers. This allows those collections of digitised images to be repurposed in many ways, and indeed, each image provider already hosted its own Web site for its own images before joining PictureAustralia. However, this is not a criterion for participation. A new opportunity Agencies embarking on new digitisation work are utilising the opportunity of PictureAustralia's existence to establish their image digitisation and metadata creation processes in such a way that the results are available to different gateways with a minimum of additional effort.
University libraries are an example of an agency who want to provide images to a number of services.
Many universities also have their own museums and galleries or art collections which would have increased use if made available via the Web, particularly for Australians in regional and remote areas. Cross-sectoral advantages Its hybrid architecture allows PictureAustralia to be a vehicle that brings attention to the collection of each participating image provider. And since Phase I of the project which developed PictureAustralia, the inaugural image providers have been joined by the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland, and the National Archives of Australia. Although some of the participating agencies have been providing digital surrogates of their images for some time, digitisation is conducted on a selective basis. That is, while many of the images in the participants' collections are described, they do not all have associated digitised images.