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Culture and Recreation Portal - for all your favourite things
By Michelle Manly
Art shows and chatgroups and museums online,
Ballet and painting and websites on songlines,
Sports news and stories and weekly 'What's new',
Music and sculpture and festivals too.
(with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein)You'll find these features and thousands more of your favourite things on the Culture and Recreation Portal (CARP). The portal has a very fast, efficient search engine that can deliver impressive results for Australian cultural and recreation material.
In researching this article, some cultural and recreation terms were chosen at random. The search engine returned the following results in no time:
- 847 records for 'aerobics';
- 17 records for 'clog dancing';
- 14 for 'cloisonné';
- 92 for 'Indigenous art and craft centres';
- 679 for 'soccer clubs';
- 918 for 'palette';
- 49 for 'swimming lessons';and
- 19 for 'macramé'.
The Culture and Recreation Portal was launched in June 2001 within the australia.gov.au framework. It had a life before this, however, as part of Australia 's Cultural Network (ACN) and has been in operation since April 1998.Most of the sites listed and indexed by ACN are now listed and indexed by CARP. With the recent expansion to include recreation, the portal now lists and indexes many additional sites relating to sport and recreation.
Other portals in the australia.gov.au framework provide government information for Australians and-depending on the needs of their users-some of them provide access to non-government resources as well. CARP is unique however in the volume of non-government information it provides because of its subject area. In fact, less than half of CARP's content is government information and more than half the visitors to CARP come from outside Australia.
When you visit CARP you'll notice there are several areas of the site-what's new, cultural resources, Internet resources, contributor services and event finders. What's new is updated weekly and features news of cultural and recreational events, activities, exhibitions and launches around Australia. The cultural resources section is where you'll find articles on the Australian cultural landscape-from Aboriginal art, the beach culture and Christmas to Chinese New Year, poetry and Ned Kelly.
You can also subscribe to the Ausculture online newsletter from here and explore databases and discussion lists. Internet resources and contributor services concentrate on the technical and business side of the Internet, with help guides and online networking opportunities for cultural and recreational organisations, including a free search engine.
CARP has its own Australian Cultural Search Engine retrieving information from over 2 200 Australian cultural and recreation websites. This search engine is so effective that in many cases users can find out more about a particular site from CARP than they can by visiting the site itself.
If your site is indexed on the portal you can use the sophisticated CARP search engine to provide a customised site search in your own website. It costs nothing, it's free of advertising, and it offers an extra service to your visitors. The Australian War Memorial is one high profile cultural organisation that uses the CARP search in its website, www.awm.gov.au. When you embed the search engine in your site you can set it to search only your own site or extend it to other cultural organisations.
The administrators of CARP make every effort to publish and provide links to reputable information of high quality. Every site indexed within the portal or linked from one of the articles has been evaluated for quality and relevance by a real, live person before making it into the database.
You'd be surprised how many other sites link to resources on the Culture and Recreation Portal (or the ACN as it is still sometimes referred to) as a credible source of information on Australian culture. It pops up quite often in searches for all sorts of things Australian. That many people can 't be wrong-why not see for yourself?
Contact:
Visit the website at www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au or find it through the government entry point australia.gov.au, but make sure you're sitting comfortably-you could be in there for hours.