The National Library of Australian IT Architecture Project Report (March 2007) is available online.

Locan Dempsey has a summary on his blog: Moving to a single business systems environment.

It’s worth reading even if it’s not quite your thing. Judith and her team explain things elegantly in a way that made me understand what info architecture is and how it applies to our libraries.

Here’s an excerpt from the overview:

Purpose
The aim of this report is to define the IT architecture that will be needed to support the management, discovery and delivery of the National Library of Australia’s collections over the next three years. The current architecture has enabled the Library to develop a significantdigital library capability over the last decade. Now the burden of maintaining and supporting existing systems and services is increasingly hindering us from bringing new services online, improving the user experience, exploring new ideas or responding to technological change. In the meantime, enormous changes are occurring in the broader environment.

Outcomes
The report identifies a new framework for building digital library services that should address
these issues by:
• Implementing a service-oriented architecture
• Adopting a single-business approach
• Considering open-source solutions when these are functional and robust.