National Library of Australia

Explore the National Library's digitised Books & Serials

Books

You can now view more than 2300 books, journals and ephemera online, ranging from James Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean and John Gould's Birds of Australia to Dorothy Wall's Blinky Bill and C.J. Dennis’ A Book for Kids. Some rare works from the Library’s Asian Collections are also worth taking a look at, such as the early Korean work on Confucian ethics Samgang haengsil, or Tian fu xia fan zhao shu from the London Missionary Society Collection.

Browse through the Library's Australian or overseas digitised print collections to find other items of interest or view the selection below. To review our progress read Books and Serials digitisation - progress so far and Digitisation - overview.

Newspapers

The Australian Newspapers service provides free online access to selected out of copyright Australian newspapers dating from 1803 to 1954, including the Sydney Morning Herald. Millions of articles are available and are added to daily. The content can be searched by keyword or browsed by date, region or title. We encourage users to interact with the data by correcting the electronically translated text, which makes the searching better for everyone, and by adding tags and comments to articles.

Journals and magazines

The Library has commenced working on digitisation of the Australian Women’s Weekly. The project involves digitisation of the magazine from inception to when it changed frequency to monthly, i.e. from 10 June 1933 to 15 December 1982. The magazine will be scanned and processed through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The Library is developing systems to support the workflows and management of the digitised content and make the content available to the public via a search and delivery interface based on the Australian Newspapers service. The project will function as a test-bed to inform the development of an ongoing journal and book digitisation program for the Library in the future.

More Books & Serials

Other online resources

March Curator's Choice

Does body language reflect a particular time in history? This new acquisition suggests it does. Compared to a group shot from, say, the early 20th century, we find that arm-crossing today is gender neutral but stance continues to distinguish males from females.