State Libraries in Australia

Abstract

Australia is a federation of six states, two self-governing territories and a number of external territories. The state libraries were modelled on the British Museum Library and saw themselves as ‘national’ institutions, with a mandate to collect ‘books of all languages and descriptions’. Until the 1950s they remained the backbone of the Australian library system. By 1962, with the expansion of university education, the holdings of the university libraries for the first time equalled the combined resources of the state libraries and the National Library of Australia (NLA). The other development that transformed the post-war library scene was the emergence of the NLA itself from the relative obscurity of the pre-war years. The rivalry that grew up between the state libraries and the NLA was eventually put to rest by a number of factors, including the creation of the Australian Bibliographic Network and the resulting National Bibliographic Database, which made all types of library more interdependent; also the enforced sharing of the new poverty of the 1980s and the early 1990s. However, the state libraries themselves are now better housed, leaner and more efficiently run than they were even a decade ago. The 5.2 million volumes they hold account for almost 13% of the nation's bibliographic resources.