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Our Australian Book and Serial Collections

The National Library of Australia has a national responsibility under the National Library Act, 1960 to build 'a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the Australian people'. In the years since its establishment as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library in 1901, the Library's collections of Australian printed material have developed into the nation's most important resource of materials recording the Australian cultural heritage. Several great Formed Collections relating to Australia and the Pacific, among them those of Edward Augustus Petherick, Sir John Ferguson and Sir Rex Nan Kivell, along with the passage of the Copyright Act, 1912, containing legal deposit provisions, laid the basis for the Library's comprehensive research collection of Australiana.

The history of publishing in and about Australia is comparatively short - spanning just over 200 years of white settlement and including earlier speculation about the Great South Land and European voyages of discovery. Tens of thousands of new items are added to the collection every year and gaps are filled in with retrospective purchases and donations. The diversity and output of the Australian publishing community testifies to the healthy attitude Australian society has toward recording its activities, concerns, achievements, conflicts, debates, celebrations, aspirations and passions.

Serials or periodicals are considered to be publications which come out a regular or irregular intervals - journals, magazines, newsletters, annual reports, newspapers, etc. and are produced by all segments of Australian society - academic, ethnic and multicultural, aboriginal, businesses, clubs and societies, scholars, government departments, professional associations, etc.

Even though the National Library has a large collection of Australian periodicals there are still gaps in sets and some titles are missing altogether. The Library is eager to fill these gaps. In recent years, for example, substantial sets of early Australian tennis magazines as well as popular fashion and women's magazines from the 1920s through to the 1940s have been purchased. The Library also compiles a list of online Australian journals, magazines, webzines, email fanzines, etc.


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NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA, Canberra, ACT 2600, AUSTRALIA, ABN: 28 346 858 075
Telephone + 61 2 6262 1111; Facsimile +61 2 6257 1703; TTY: 1800 026 372