Original National Library building (1934), demolished 1968
TheNational Library of Australia (NLA), formerly theCommonwealth National Library andCommonwealth Parliament Library, is the largestreference library in Australia, responsible under the terms of theNational Library Act 1960 for "maintaining and developing a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating toAustralia and theAustralian people", thus functioning as anational library. It is located inParkes, Canberra,ACT.
Created in 1960 by theNational Library Act, by the end of June 2019 its collection contained 7,717,579 items, with its manuscript material occupying 17,950 metres (58,890 ft) of shelf space. The NLA also hosts and manages theTrove cultural heritage discovery service, which includes access to theAustralian Web Archive andNational edeposit (NED), a large collection ofdigitised newspapers, official documents, manuscripts and images, as well asborn-digital material.
In 1901 theCommonwealth Parliament Library[8] was established to serve thenewly 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, SirFrederick William Holder defined the objective of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library in the following words:[9]
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-famedLibrary 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.
From 1923, two forms of name were used concurrently: Commonwealth National Library and Commonwealth Parliament Library, to designate the national and parliamentary collections respectively.[8]
In 1957 the Paton Committee recommended a National Library as an independentstatutory body.[10]
In 1960 the National Library of Australia was created[8] by theNational Library Act 1960,[11] and each library became a separate entity.[8]
Prime MinisterJohn Gorton officially opening the National Library on 15 August 1968
The original National Library building onKings Avenue, Canberra was designed byEdwin Hubert Henderson (1885–1939), who was Chief Architect of the Commonwealth of Australia from 1929 to 1939, and built in 1934. Originally intended to be several wings, only one wing was completed, partly because of the advent of World War II. The 1957 Paton Committee reported that the accommodation was inadequate for a National Library. The building was used for the headquarters of the Canberra Public Library Service until its demolition in 1968, when it became the site of theEdmund Barton Building.[10]
The large National Library building is home to various reading rooms and collections. Usage of the reading rooms include speaking to expert staff, browsing the library's reference collection and electronic journals, ebooks, indexes, and databases. The reading rooms also provide free internet and computer use, scanning, photocopying and printing, and the request and access of collection items.[17] On the ground floor is the Main Reading Room — 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 Newspaper & Family History zone on the ground floor, the Special Collections Reading Room and thePetherick Reading Room on the 1st floor, and Asian Collections on level 3.
The library collects material produced by Australians, for Australians or about the Australian experience in all formats—not just printed works—books, serials, newspapers, maps, posters, music and printedephemera—but also online publications and unpublished material such asmanuscripts, pictures andoral histories.Hazel de Berg began recording Australian writers, artists, musicians and others in the Arts community in 1957. She conducted nearly 1300 interviews. Together with the library, she was a pioneer in the field in Australia, working together for twenty-seven years.[18]
A coreAustraliana collection is that ofJohn A. Ferguson.[19] The library's Australiana collections are the nation's most important resource of materials recording Australia's cultural heritage.[20] The library has particular collection strengths in theperforming arts, including dance.
The library contains a considerable collection of general overseas andrare book materials, as well as world-class Asian and Pacific collections which augment the Australiana collections. The print collections are further supported by extensivemicroform holdings.
The library also maintains the National ReserveBraille Collection.
As a national library, the NLA is required bylegal deposit provisions enshrined in theCopyright Act 1968 to collect a copy of every Australian publication in the country, which publishers must submit upon publication of the material.[21][22]
At the end of theAustralian financial year of 2018–19, the National Library collection comprised 7,717,579 items, and an additional 17,950 metres (58,890 ft) of manuscript material.[4] The library's collections ofAustraliana have developed into the nation's single most important resource of materials recording the Australian cultural heritage.Australian writers,editors andillustrators are actively sought and well represented, 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.[23] With the assistance and support of library staff from London, New York City, and Jakarta, building various collections have been possible.
Approximately 94.1% of the library's collection had been catalogued by July 2019, a total of 5,453,888 items[4] and these are discoverable through the online catalogue.[24]
The library is a world leader indigital preservation techniques,[25] and has maintained an Internet-accessible archive of selected Australian websites called thePandora Archive since 1996. TheAustralian Web Archive, released in March 2019, combines records from PANDORA, theAustralian Government Web Archive (AGWA), and other websites published in Australia. In the 2019 federal budget, the government allocatedA$10 million to the library, intended to be spread over four years to set up a digitisation fund.[26]
As of June 2019[update], the library haddigitised a total of 5,508,008 images.[27] Where possible, these are delivered directly across the Internet.
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, andVietnamese.
The library has acquired a number of important Western and Asian language scholarly collections from researchers and bibliophiles. These collections include:
Discussion of the acquisition and preservation process ofJoan Blaeu'sArchipelagus Orientalis (1663) by the National Library (2013)
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 metres of shelf space (ACA Australian Archival Statistics, 1998). The collection relates predominantly to Australia, but there are also important holdings relating toPapua New Guinea,New Zealand and thePacific. 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 centuryChertseyCartulary, the journal ofJames Cook onHM Bark Endeavour, inscribed on the Memory of the World[35] Register in 2001, the diaries ofRobert O'Hara Burke andWilliam John Wills from theBurke and Wills expedition, andCharles Kingsford Smith's andCharles Ulm's log of the Southern Cross.
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.[38]
Media represented in the collection include photographs, drawings, watercolours, oils, lithographs, engravings, etchings and sculpture/busts.[39]
The library contains a large amount of printedephemera, collected since the early 1960s and also including older materials. These include minor publications, pamphlets, leaflets, invitations, cards, menus,junk mail, as well as larger publications, such astheatre programmes or retail trade catalogues. They are selected based on certain key criteria, such as information content, design elements, period representation, andportraiture. They are divided into various types or topics.[40]
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. It provides services to libraries, publishers and the general public, with membership available to residents of Australia providing access to additional services.[45][46]
Prepublication Data Service,[47]ISSNs andISMNs for Australian publishers.
National edeposit (NED), to fulfilllegal deposit obligations.[48] NLA hosts and manages the service, whereby allborn-digital content published in Australia, as required by legal deposit legislation under theCopyright Act 1968, is deposited remotely by the publisher, stored and made accessible to member libraries and the public.[29][49][50][28]
For librarians:
TheAustralian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD)[51] and offers free access through the Libraries Australia[52] subscription-based service. It is used for reference, collection development, cataloguing and interlibrary lending.
National Libraries Gateway.
Online, for the general public:
TheAustralian Web Archive, which now incorporatesPANDORA (established 1996), the Australian Government Web Archive (AWA) and the ".au" domain archive.
National Library of Australia Catalogue, a catalogue of resources in NLA which are available to the general public.[53]
Ask a Librarian for users in need of research assistance or general information about the National Library of Australia.[54]
The online services mentioned above, and more, are accessible via the Trove service, which was launched in 2009. Trove is an online library database aggregator, a centralised national service built with the collaboration of major libraries of Australia.[55] Trove's most well known feature is the digitised collection of Australian newspapers. Most NLA resource discovery services are now fully integrated with Trove. The service is able to locate resources about Australia and Australians, which reaches many locations otherwise unavailable to external search engines.[56]
The library seen from Lake Burley Griffin in autumn.
The library produces non-fiction and children's books which explore the collections. These cover subjects including History,Natural History and Art.[57] NLA Publishing has been a recipient of severalEve Pownall Award for Information Books.
Free registration with the library is allowed for all Australian residents, with cards sent to a physical address before use is allowed. Membership confers some extra benefits for users of the library, such as requesting items for use onsite in the reading rooms, and access to a select range of licensed electronic resources from offsite, such as the full text ofEncyclopaedia Britannica.[58] Electronic copies of some items are able to be ordered, and for members who can visit the library in person,inter-library loans may be obtained to use in thereading rooms.[59]
In 2016, with threatenedfunding cuts to Trove, a public campaign led to a government commitment ofA$16.4 million in December 2016, spread over four years.[56][64]
By early 2020, with the surge in demand for all types of digital services, the National Library was having to cope with increasingly dwindling staff resources to develop services on Trove and National edeposit, and undertook a restructure of its staffing and operations.[65]
On september 2025, the website of the National Library of Australia was tested for conformance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), in its version WCAG 2.2, usingPopetech,WikidataQ136356968 as evaluation platform, which, in turn, usesWAVE web accessibility evaluation tool,WikidataQ136357132 as automated web accessibilty evaluaton tool (AWAET).
The website of National Library of Australia obtained a score of 8.9 decimal out of 10. This is known as Automated Accessibility Score provided by Popetech, which, in turn, uses WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool. The test was taken on September 2025 as part of a research on web accessibility of national libraries around the world[66].
This result means that the website of National Library of Australia can be considered accessible, if the treshold is stablised as 8 out of 10. Howerver efforts still need to be made to achieve full compliance with web accessibility directives.
This section is added to this page in order to raise awarness about the web accessibility barriers faced by persons with disbilities that limit them to equally enjoying the Web. Web accessibilily is considered basic human right by theConvention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities[67] from theUnited Nations (UN).
^A different view : the National Library of Australia and its building art. Canberra, ACT, Australia: National Library of Australia. 2004.ISBN0-642-10763-7.OCLC56876884.
^"Reading Rooms".National Library of Australia. Retrieved13 July 2024.
^Artists' Portraits: selected and introduced by Geoffrey Dutton. Canberra, Australian Capitol Territory: National Library of Australia. 1992. p. 1.ISBN0642105790.
^Nso Mangue, Pastor (25 September 2025)."World Wide Web".Web accessibility evaluation of National Libraries and ISBN Agencies - September 2025. Vol. 1. Mendeley Data.doi:10.17632/2rpn9vhwct.1 – via data.mendeley.com.
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