Australia
Australia
Formal Name: National Library of Australia
Address:
Parkes Place, Canberra, ACT 2600
Phone: (06) 2621111;
Fax: 2571703;
E-mail:
infoserv@nla.gov.au
The National Library of Australia was established in 1903 as the Library of the first Commonwealth Parliament and in 1960 as an autonomous institution governed by its own Council. The archives function was subsequently separated into what is now the Australian Archives.
From the beginning the Parliament had grand aspirations for the National Library, starting that it should be developed on the lines of the Library of Congress in the United States. The Library's main tasks are to be a major provider of information services, the central agency for collecting and disseminating bibliographic data and other library services; the hub of the Australian library network, providing and supporting a wide range of resource-sharing and other cooperative services; and a national heritage institution, acquiring and preserving a comprehensive collection of Australian library material. Its holdings in 1991 included more than 2,700,000 monographs, about 2,000,000 microform equivalents, 105,000 current serials, and estensive collections of manuscripts, oral history, and pictorial and other heritage materials. It published a new collection development policy in 1990.
A major achievement of the Library was the establishment
of the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN) in 1981. ABN is a national
resource-sharing network, providing cataloguing data to Australian libraries
and enabling them to share their cataloguing effort
to achieve significant cost savings. It also provides online access to
nationwide information about the location of library materials and supports
interlibrary loans. By 1991 more than 1,100 libraries used ABN, which had
almost eight million bibliographic records in its database and thirteen
million locations for items in Australian libraries.
The National Library has played a strong leadership
role since the early 1980s. It convened an Australian
Libraries Summit meeting in 1988 to reach agreement on the most effective
structures and processes for delivering library and information services
throughout the nation to the year 2000. Its "Towards Federation 2001" conference
of 1992, based on a similar planning process, was expected to formulate
a similar agenda for improving control and access to Australia's heritage
collections. Aboriginal access will be a key element of that agenda.
World guide to libraries. New York: Saur, 1998.
World encyclopedia of library and information services. 3rd ed.
Chicago: American Library Association, c1993.