Building scholarly online multimedia collections and services

This paper outlines the evolution of an approach to building multimedia database applications for research and learning in an Australian university. This has involved an ongoing collaboration between the library, as database developer, together with research scholars and course managers, as application directors and discipline consultants. The paper provides details of three particular projects, the Australian Zooarchaeology image database, the fourteenth century music database and Audio Visual online. Each application has used the technological infrastructure provided by the library to develop unique and successful approaches to research and learning. All, in different ways, take advantage of the many new multimedia capabilities of the WWW and suggest that such an approach could be developed into a working model for building sustainable quality multimedia Web resources for research and learning.