culture.gov.au
Connecting you with Australian culture online
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About the Culture Portal
Contents
| Purpose | Statistics| Services provided | Administration | Customer-focussed portals | History of the Portal | Using this site | Contacts |Purpose
The Culture Portal provides online access to Australian culture websites from all levels of government and the non-government sector and is the premier online access point for Australian culture. The aims and objectives of the Culture Portal are detailed in the Mission statement.
Bern Emmerichs, Who Are You?, 2003, earthenware with underglaze. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia.
The Culture Portal provides access to:
- over 200 Australian Stories with evaluated links
- a database of over 4,200 evaluated websites
- weekly News and Events from across regional and metropolitan Australia
- Online Resources for the culture sector
The Culture Portal is especially useful for:
- students and educators
- culture sector professionals
- website developers
- the general public
Statistics
The Culture Portal was the 15th most popular Australian Government website (XLS, 180KB) across Australia in December 2006* with wide range of usage indicated from the general public, the culture and education sectors and overseas visitors, as well as visits from other government websites. Culture Portal statistics for July 2008 - June 2009 were:
- Visits per annum - 5 126 674
- Websites listed - 4272
- Pages indexed - 3 536 160
*Dispain, Gavin, Department of the Environment and Heritage, 'A web standards audit of 105 Australian Government web sites, December 2006', presented at the Canberra Web Standards Group, January 2007
Services provided
Australian Stories
Sidney Nolan, Kelly and horse, 1946, enamel on composition board. Image courtesy of the Nolan Gallery
Find out about Australian architecture and design, digital media and film, festivals, history, Indigenous culture, language and literature, performance, natural environment and heritage and the visual arts and crafts.
The Culture Portal's collection of Australian Stories covers key educational themes and cultural activities, with links to online information including 'look, listen and play' websites. The Australian Stories are catalogued alphabetically and thematically.
News and Events
Bangarra Dance Theatre 'Strings' from Unaipon, CLAN 2006. Photograph by Shane Reid, courtesy of Adelaide Bank 2004 Festival of Arts and the Bangarra Dance Theatre.
Read weekly News and Events and have the news fed to your browser through a RSS feed.
Subscribe to a the monthly Ozculture newsletter for a selection of what is happening around Australia that month, showcasing new and revised Australian Stories, featured events and new websites as well as a monthly 'callout' for online creatives.
Resources
Culture sector professionals will appreciate the wide range of resources from jobs and employment, culture discussion lists, grants and services database, Training Course Finder, venue information, digital content industry information, sources of information for volunteers, web publishing, intellectual property and copyright as well as key resources and peak bodies.
The resources section is currently being updated and fresh relevant information will be available in March 2009, including updated grants and services database, and Training Course Finder.
Websites - database and search capacity
Australian world champion surfer Layne Beachley. Photograph courtesy of the BBC.
The Culture Portal provides access to a database with over 4,200 Australian culture websites. This means that all text content of a website will be indexed enabling search of content via our search engine. This database includes all the national and state cultural collecting institutions.
The listing of websites in the Culture Portal's websites database enhances the visibility of websites from Australian culture organisations and services in search engine rankings. This means that topic areas, relevant to Australian culture, rank in the top five of the Google rankings, for example. The Culture Portal's websites database thus greatly enhances the visibility of Australian culture.
Websites - and the Culture Portal's Bluey Search Engine
The Bluey Search Engine finds and organises relevant information using millions of pages of data from the database of Australian culture websites. (Bluey is the name of a popular sheep dog, the blue heeler, bred in Australia, to round up large numbers of sheep in Australia's rural and outback areas.)
Australian websites listed on the Culture Portal's database can also install the free Bluey Search Engine, for use on their sites. Consequently, many institutions and organisations use our free Bluey search facility to enhance their website.
Please check our website collection policy if you would like to add a website to the Culture Portal.
Websites - browse via thesaurus category, audience and location
Users can browse and search the database of websites by category, audience or location or a combination of all of these using the advanced search.
Contributors services
Specialist services for owners and developers of our indexed sites are available from the Contributors services screen.
Administration
The Culture Portal is an initiative of, and is administered by, the Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.
Customer focussed portals
This site is one of a series of Australian Government customer-focused websites or 'portals'. These portals and their entry point, australia.gov.au, formed the Customer Focussed Portals Framework, part of the Government Online Strategy. The portals were designed to provide you with easy online access to relevant information and services by allowing you to find what you were looking for without having to know which agency or organisation to contact. Depending on the likely needs of the user, many of these portals will also provide access to non-government resources. Of the sites listed by the Culture Portal, approximately 400 are government sites. The remaining sites are from non-government sources.
The Flying Fruit Fly Circus, Les Clownes Triste, Japan Tour 2005. Photograph courtesy of the The Flying Fruit Fly Circus.
The eGovernment Strategy, 2006 looks forward with a vision for 2010 of:
- Meeting Users' Needs
- Connected Service Delivery
- Value for Money
- Public Sector Capability
History of the Portal
The Culture Portal was known as the Culture and Recreation Portal, launched in June 2001, which had been developed from the platform of Australia's Cultural Network (ACN), available since 1997.
One of the aims of ACN was to promote the national arts institutions by providing wide electronic access to the cultural collections. The ACN objectives were to increase audience reach and provide innovative outreach programmes and to lay the foundations for cultural institutions nationwide to work more effectively together. It was noted that in order to provide a rich information environment it was important to link into major culture databases and to encourage developments in this area, and provide context and meaning. The Culture Portal continues to work in this area and is hoping to offer a linked search facility in 2008-09 through the options on the search page.
The Culture Portal abides by agreed minimum accessibility and usability standards as well as offering sophisticated capabilities, including access to relevant non-government resources. Please see the Application and interpretation of the Website Collection Policy.
Using this site
For a quick guide see Navigating around this website. Assistance in using the site is also available at Help. You may also find the Frequently Asked Questions useful. To find out more about using our search facility, read our Help with searches and search results.
Our Sitemap provides an overview of the structure of this site.
Contacts
Please check the list of answers to our most Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) before emailing us.
Use the Contact us screen to report any technical problems with the website and to suggest any improvements to functionality or usability.
Or you can write to us at the following address:
Culture Portal
Australian Government Department
of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts
GPO Box 787
Canberra ACT 2601
Australia
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