National library of australia

The National Library of Australia grew out of the Federal Parliamentary Library that was established in 1901 in Canberra. In 1960, the National Library Act created the National Library of Australia as we know it today. Currently, the library occupies a building reminiscent of the Greek Parthenon in design which is located on Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin. It houses a very-large collection of books, maps, manuscripts, journals, audio recordings and microfilm and is not open to the public. It’s also interesting to note that under Australian copyright law, every book published in the country is also sent to the National Library.

The Australian National Library is continually involved in digitizing its literature collection and now has more than 100,000 selections available in digital format for use via the internet. It has already achieved status as a world leader in digitizing literature for internet dissemination. They have never been shy of using technology and were one of the first universities in Australia to start digitizing their books for benefit of the readers far away.

The very-large library building in Canberra features various reading rooms and literature collections. There is a main reading room on the ground floor where most of the library’s internet terminals are located and can be used via wireless connection. Services are also available from the Petherick reading room for advanced readers and also from the map, microcopy and newspaper reading rooms which also occupy the lower ground floor area of the library building. In addition there are manuscripts and photographs on the second floor and collections from Asia on the third floor. There is also a small amount of aspce for readers at the Hume Annex.

The depository for the Australian National Bibliographic Database is within the National Library and is accessible from Libraries Australia services. Details including ISSNs, ISMNs and Catalogue-in-Publication are made available to publishers from the library upon request.

Huge picture collections are available from Picture Australia, a library service that makes searching more than forty digitized databases of Australia, its citizens and their lifestyles possible. This data is obtained from images arriving from libraries, museums and others.

Finally, the National Library of Australia offers Libraries Australia, a unque sharing service for Australian libraries and their many readers.This service enables inter-library lending, cataloging and referencing and has the Australian National Bibliographic Database a its center. This database details the precise location of more than 40 million printed items spread throughout national, academic, state and public and special libraries.