The National Library of Australia is the largest reference library of Australia, responsible under the terms of the National Library Act for "maintaining and developing a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the Australian people." In 2012â€"2013, the National Library collection comprised 6,496,772 items, and an additional 15,506 metres of manuscript material.
History
The National Library of Australia, while formally established by the passage of the National Library Act 1960, had been functioning as a National Library rather than strictly a Parliamentary Library, almost since its inception.
In 1901 a Commonwealth Parliamentary Library was established to serve the newly formed Federal Parliament of Australia. From its inception the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library was driven to development of a truly national collection. In 1907 the Joint Parliamentary Library Committee under the Chairmanship of the Speaker, Sir Frederick Holder defined the objective of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library in the following words:
The Library Committee is keeping before it the ideal of building up, for the time when Parliament shall be established in the Federal Capital, a great Public Library on the lines of the world-famed Library of Congress at Washington; such a library, indeed, as shall be worthy of the Australian Nation; the home of the literature, not of a State, or of a period, but of the world, and of all time.
The present library building was opened in 1968. The building was designed by the architectural firm of Bunning and Madden. The foyer is decorated in marble, with stained glass windows by Leonard French and three tapestries by Mathieu Matégot.
Collections
In 2012â€"2013 the Library collection comprised 6,496,772 items, with an estimated additional 2,325,900 items held in the manuscripts collection. The Library's collections of Australiana have developed into the nation's single most important resource of materials recording the Australian cultural heritage. Australian writers, editors and illustrators are actively sought and well representedâ€"whether published in Australia or overseas.
The Library’s collection includes all formats of material, from books, journals, websites and manuscripts to pictures, photographs, maps, music, oral history recordings, manuscript papers and ephemera.
Approximately 92.1% of the Library's collection has been catalogued and is discoverable through the online catalogue.
The Library has digitized over 174,000 items from its collection (the 100,000th being http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3409117) and, where possible, delivers these directly across the Internet. The Library is a world leader in digital preservation techniques, and maintains an Internet-accessible archive of selected Australian websites called the Pandora Archive.
Australian & General Collection
The Library collects material produced by Australians, for Australians or about the Australian experience in all formatsâ€"not just printed worksâ€"books, serials, newspapers, maps, posters, music and printed ephemeraâ€"but also online publications and unpublished material such as manuscripts, pictures and oral histories. The Library has particular collection strengths in the performing arts, including dance.
The Library's considerable collections of general overseas and rare book materials, as well as world-class Asian and Pacific collections which augment the Australiana collections. The print collections are further supported by extensive microform holdings.
The Library also maintains the National Reserve Braille Collection.
Asian Collections
The Library houses the largest and most actively developing research resource on Asia in Australia, and the largest Asian language collections in the Southern hemisphere, with over half a million volumes in the collection, as well as extensive online and electronic resources. The Library collects resources about all Asian countries in Western languages extensively, and resources in the following Asian languages: Burmese, Chinese, Persian, Indonesian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Manchu, Mongolian, Thai, Timorese, and Vietnamese.
The Library has acquired a number of important Western and Asian language scholarly collections from researchers and bibliophiles. These collections include:
- Australian Buddhist Library Collection
- Braga Collection (Portuguese in Asia)
- Claasz Collection (Sri Lanka)
- Coedes Collection (Indo-China)
- London Missionary Society Collection (China)
- Luce Collection (Burma)
- McLaren-Human Collection (Korea)
- Otley Beyer Collection (Philippines)
- Sakakibara Collection (Japan)
- Sang Ye Collection (China)
- Simon Collection (East Asia)
- Harold S. Williams Collection (Japan)
The Asian Collections are searchable via the National Library's catalogue.
Pictures and Manuscripts
The National Library holds an extensive collection of pictures and manuscripts. The manuscript collection contains about 26 million separate items, covering in excess of 10,492 meters of shelf space (ACA Australian Archival Statistics, 1998). The collection relates predominantly to Australia, but there are also important holdings relating to Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and the Pacific. The collection also holds a number of European and Asian manuscript collections or single items have been received as part of formed book collections.
The Australian manuscript collections date from the period of maritime exploration and settlement in the 18th century until the present, with the greatest area of strength dating from the 1890s onwards. The collection includes a large number of outstanding single items, such as the 14th century Chertsey Cartulary, the journal of James Cook on the HM Bark Endeavour, inscribed on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, the diaries of Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills from the Burke and Wills expedition, and Charles Kingsford Smith's and Charles Ulm's log of the Southern Cross.
A wide range of individuals and families are represented in the collection, with special strength in the fields of politics, public administration, diplomacy, theatre, art, literature, the pastoral industry and religion. Examples are the papers of Alfred Deakin, Sir John Latham, Sir Keith Murdoch, Sir Hans Heysen, Sir John Monash, Vance Palmer and Nettie Palmer, A.D. Hope, Manning Clark, David Williamson, W.M. Hughes, Sir Robert Menzies, Sir William McMahon, Lord Casey, Geoffrey Dutton, Peter Sculthorpe, Daisy Bates, Jessie Street, and Eddie Mabo and James Cook both of whose papers were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme Register in 2001.
The Library has also acquired the records of many national non-governmental organisations. They include the records of the Federal Secretariats of the Liberal party, the A.L.P, the Democrats, the R.S.L., the Australian Inland Mission, the Australian Union of Students, The Australian Ballet, the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, the Australian Institute of Urban Studies, Australian Industries Protection League, the Australian Conservation Foundation, and the Australian Council of National Trusts. Finally, the Library holds about 37,000 reels of microfilm of manuscripts and archival records, mostly acquired overseas and predominantly of Australian and Pacific interest.
The National Library’s Pictures collection focuses on Australian people, places and events, from European exploration of the South Pacific to contemporary events. Art works and photographs are acquired primarily for their informational value, and for their importance as historical documents.
Media represented in the collection include photographs, drawings, watercolours, oils, lithographs, engravings, etchings and sculpture/busts.
Reading rooms
The large National Library building is home to various reading rooms and collections. On the ground floor is the Main Reading Roomâ€"this is where the bulk of the Library's Internet access terminals are located, and where wireless internet access is available. Services are also delivered on-site from the Petherick Reading Room (for advanced readers) on the ground floor; the Newspaper & Microforms and Map Reading Rooms on the lower-ground floor, Manuscripts and Pictures on level 2, and Asian Collections on level 3. Limited space is also available for readers at the Hume Annexe.
Services
The National Library of Australia provides a national leadership role in developing and managing collaborative online services with the Australian library community, making it easier for users to find and access information resources at the national level.
- Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD) and offers free access through the Libraries Australia subscription based service which is also operated by the NLA. It is used for reference, collection development, cataloguing and interlibrary lending.
- Cataloguing-in-Publication (CiP) details, ISSNs and ISMNs for Australian publishers.
- PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive. A collection of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with nine other Australian libraries and cultural collecting organisations.
- Trove, online library database aggregator
Trove
'Trove is an online library database aggregator, a centralised national service built with the collaboration of major libraries of Australia. Trove's most well known feature is the digitised collection of Australian newspapers. Many of the NLA's resource discovery services have been fully integrated with Trove - meaning that several (such as "music Australia", "pictures Australia" and "Australian newspapers") are now accessible only through the site. Others (such as PANDORA and the ANBD) use Trove as their primary means of public access. The service is able locate resources about Australia and Australians, which reaches many locations otherwise unavailable to external search engines.
Directors
- 1901â€"1927 Arthur Wadsworth, Interim Commonwealth Parliamentary Librarian
- 1927â€"1947 Kenneth Binns CBE, Commonwealth Parliamentary Librarian
- 1947â€"1970 Harold Leslie White CBE, National Librarian
- 1970â€"1974 Allan Percy Fleming CBE, National Librarian
- 1974â€"1980 George Chandler, Director-General
- 1980â€"1985 Harrison Bryan AO, Director-General
- 1985â€"1999 Warren Horton AM, Director-General
- 1999â€"2010 Jan Fullerton AO, Director-General
- 2011â€"present Anne-Marie Schwirtlich Director-General
See also
- List of national libraries
- Parliamentary triangle, Canberra
References
External links
- National Library of Australia| NLA Library Shop * NLA Bookplate restaurant
- Our Nation's Album: The Library's first 100 years 1901â€"2001
- National Library Act 1960 and History
- Australian Libraries Gateway
- Australian Interlibrary Resource Sharing Directory
- Electronic Resources Australia (ERA)
- NLA Preservation Policy
- Trove
- National Library of Australia National Library of Australia, Trove, People and Organisation record for National Library of Australia
- Commonwealth National Library (Australia) National Library of Australia, Trove, People and Organisation record for Commonwealth National Library (Australia)
- Commonwealth Parliament Library (Australia) National Library of Australia, Trove, People and Organisation record for Commonwealth Parliament Library (Australia)
