The first service of its kind in the world, PictureAustralia features images, dating from the late eighteenth century through to the present, that are held in some of Australia's leading cultural institutions.

Highlights include artworks featuring The Kelly Gang, photographs of Nellie Melba singing at the opening of Parliament House, portraits of Prime Ministers, photographs of the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge by Harold Cazneaux, images of Australians at war and digitised heritage artworks including paintings by colonial artist John Glover.

Hosted by the National Library of Australia, PictureAustralia provides one gateway to images from its own collection and those of the Australian War Memorial, the State Library of New South Wales, the State Library of Tasmania, the State Library of Victoria, the National Archives of Australia and the Fryer Library of the University of Queensland.

'PictureAustralia is a wonderful example of what can be achieved when cultural institutions collaborate,' Ms Fullerton said. 'Through this service, Australians, regardless of their location, can access the nation's pictorial treasures.'

The PictureAustralia service is based on a metadata index held at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The service has a 'hybrid' architecture with a centralised search index and distributed images and relies on the Internet for its delivery.

Users can search the central metadata index for their subject of interest, view image thumbnails in their results, then go to a participating agency's web site to view a larger version of the image and order a high resolution copy if needed.

The PictureAustralia service uses metadata in Dublin Core format, see: http://mirror.nla.gov.au/dc/.

Every month the National Library of Australia gathers this metadata from each participating agency using metadata harvesting software. The metadata is stored at the Library in XML (eXtensible Markup Language). An index is built using this metadata which PictureAustralia users search when using the service.

The software being used by the Library to gather the metadata and build the search index is MetaStar from Blue Angel Technologies, see: http://www.blueangeltech.com/.

This architecture is simple and scalable and it adds value to the pictorial collections of cultural agencies already accessible on the Internet through their amalgamation within the PictureAustralia service.