• Index of this issue

No. 63, November 2008

Singapore Infopedia is a content database focused on Singapore and on its culture, history and people. The content of the database comprises informative articles on a wide variety of topics related to Singapore´s history and culture. This includes personalities, organizations and events during various eras in Singapore´s history. Accompanying each article are references used in writing the article and a brief bibliography for further reading. The intent is to encourage users to read more about the topic, after reading the article.

Singapore Infopedia Article Page with Discover Feature for Users to Explore a Range of
Related Articles, Images and Other Related Resources

When the National Library Singapore (NLS) first started developing Singapore Infopedia, the content was hosted on the National Library Board website, www.nlb.gov.sg. Despite efforts to promote it, the number of users who accessed Singapore Infopedia was only 200 to 400 a month. To reach out to more users, NLS began exploring a new strategy for delivering the content in Singapore Infopedia to its users. As many users were using Internet search engines to search and get information instead of using the library´s online catalogue or digital library, the strategy was to push the content to Internet spaces where users are doing their searches and to make use of popular platforms such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to deliver the content to users.

In November 2006, the content in Singapore Infopedia was put on a microsite, http://infopedia.nl.sg/, and was exposed to Google to crawl and index, allowing users to search the content via the usual Google search. In November 2006 when the content was first made available via this microsite, there was a total of 30,000 views of the articles in a month, compared to the 200 to 400 a month previously. In September 2008, the microsite had 150,000 views a month, or a 375-fold increase in the use of the same content.

Besides prototyping new ways of reaching out to the users, NLS also considered the many new opportunities offered by the Internet and social networking tools. InfopediaTalk is a recent initiative to engage users and keep them coming back through a blog site. InfopediaTalk converts the articles in Singapore Infopedia into blog postings to encourage conversation and interaction among the users and to engage users to contribute to the content in Singapore Infopedia through sharing of facts and interesting trivia and anecdotes. Another recent initiative is Infopedia Map, which makes use of a customised Google map to display geographic locations in Singapore Infopedia articles.

Through these efforts, NLS hopes to make its content about Singapore more accessible to its users, and to allow users to discover this digital content wherever they are, through the available means of access to the web.