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This article discusses the successful Australian service, PictureAustralia, a collaboration which utilises the Web as a delivery mechanism for enhanced access to unique cultural materials. PictureAustralia has been a very useful platform for exploring the benefits and disadvantages of federated searching with an emphasis on interoperability, and it continues to provide opportunities to explore new protocols in the future.

The key political and strategic issues which need to be addressed for the future development of the Australian subject gateways are: continued quality of content creation, integration of access to print and electronic resources, archiving and persistent identification, sustainability of services and service integration. These isssues will be more effectively tackled internationally, and the Australian subject gateways are keen to work with international collaborators to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome.

The National Library of Australia are strong supporters of the International Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. This article reports on current work by the NLA on metadata. In particular it describes the MetaMatters web site, an attempt to encapsulate information about the use of standard metadata schemeas and their implementors in Australia, and collect links and readings on metadata generally.

Grammar and syntax combine with vocabulary to allow human beings to communicate. Metadata and protocols combine with data to allow computer systems to exchange data usefully. Humans may communicate via internet email with the feeling that they are dealing only with another person. Yet they rely on hidden conventions and agreements regarding the structure of messages, the content of some parts of the message, and the way that message are transmitted and forwarded from one computer to the next. Some email users have realised that consistent use of the subject heading of a message can make it easier for recipients to handle their mail, for example by including labels that tie the message to a particular project, or a previous message.

“Quality‐controlled subject gateways” are Internet services which apply a rich set of quality measures to support systematic resource discovery. Considerable manual effort is used to secure a selection of resources which meet quality criteria and to display a rich description of these resources with standards‐based metadata. Regular checking and updating ensure good collection management. A main goal is to provide a high quality of subject access through indexing resources using controlled vocabularies and by offering a deep classification structure for advanced searching and browsing. This article provides an initial empirical overview of existing services of this kind, their approaches and technologies, based on proposed working definitions and typologies of subject gateways.

In this article I examine one film, Puberty Blues, directed by Bruce Beresford in 1981. According to the Australian Film Commission, the film is number forty four of the top Australian films at the Australian Box Office from 1966 to 2005 having earned over three million dollars. The view put here is that this film throws light on the history of the comprehensive coeducational high school at a particular moment. The article maintains that Puberty Blues pursues a damning representation of the ineffectual and irrelevant nature of school life for the students it features. This unsettling film shows the comprehensive coeducational secondary school, itself a product of a middle class vision of the civil society, to be failing in its promise of extending ‘respectable’ and materially aspirant middle class values to youth. It is suggested that the decline in patronage of the public coeducational comprehensive school by the middle class and aspiring others may in part be attributable overall to the powerful negative images of schools such as those in Puberty Blues that have widely circulated in Australian and Anglophone popular culture, especially in feature film. It also hypothesises that the middle class flight from the comprehensive high school may be in part attributable to the fact that some of their children may have ‘deserted’ the schools first.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a seven stage community engagement process to develop and disseminate community uptake strategies which encouraged cybersafety as part of a positive transition from primary to secondary school among Australian young people.

The combined principles from socio-ecological models, community development models and student participation models formed the foundation for the strategies. Resources were developed for all members of the community – students, parents, teachers and the broader community. The methods included: the formation of a steering committee and a Youth Advisory Board; review of the current literature; development of online resources; a youth resource development activity; development of youth resources; translation of resources into health promotion initiatives; and the dissemination of resources at community events and facilities such as schools, libraries and recreation centres and through print and social media.

Community engagement strategies – in particular a partnership between a Western Australian university and local government body, the steering committee consisting of local organisations, and the student advisory board – were used to successfully design and promote resources developed by young people for young people.

This study utilises a community-level approach to develop resources to encourage cybersafety and a positive transition from primary to secondary school.

National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) are highly accomplished teachers who have learned to deprivatize their teaching practice, and hence provide a valuable model for teacher leadership. This chapter, which focuses on NBCTs as mentors of teacher candidates in a professional development school (PDS) setting, blends the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards’ Five Core Propositions, Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium Standards, and National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education PDS Standards to operationalize teacher leadership among four NBCTs. Utilizing multiple case-study research methods, data were gathered using prereflections, weekly e-mail prompts, and end-of-semester interviews. Six common threads focus on NBCTs serving as bridges from preservice to in-service teaching and creating distributed leadership opportunities.