News in from Tony Boston at the National Library of Australia — Libraries Australia and Picture Australia have openSearch plugins available for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox2 and are registered on the A9.com web site.

These ones present the results in rss format and the user clicks through to see the item in either the LA or PA web pages.

Both can be added to your compatible browsers from this page:

http://librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au/

Why would you want to do this? You can use the browser search box in the toolbar to search without having to navigate to the site first. Big time-saver for regular LA searchers.

Tony reports that “we’re [NLA] encouraging cultural and heritage agencies to OpenSearch enable their collection databases”. Want to read more about it… http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/federatedsearch.html

It is not all that difficult to build openSearch plugins. I have created them for MPOW’s library catalogue and institutional repository and they are available from the Library website – how I did it.