|






 |
| View
Film |
|
 |
Interior
Parliamentary Library, Parliament House Melbourne pre-1927
photograph
Pictorial Collection
|
In
1907 the Committee reported to Parliament:
The
Library Committee is keeping before it the ideal of building up, for the
time when the Parliament shall be established in the Federal Capital,
a great Public Library on the lines of the world-famed Library of Congress
at Washington; such a Library, indeed, shall be worthy of the Australian
Nation; the home of literature, not of a state, or of a period, but of
the world, and of all time.
The
aspirations of a Library to be ‘not of a state, or of a period, but of
the world’ looked far beyond providing a library service to politicians
and reflected the lofty ambitions of the young nation for whom anything
and everything seemed possible. In reality, the task before the Commonwealth
Parliamentary Library—establishing a research library of distinction—was
formidable.
In
the early years of the Library, building the collections was a priority.
Equally important, however, was the need to provide access to those collections.
A sixth edition (1896) of the classification system created by the
Mr Melvil Dewey, Director of the New York State Library, was bought
by the Library in 1905. A standardised classification system not only
made the Library more efficient but also paved the way for effective communication
between other libraries. In the same year, Arthur Wadsworth began ordering
catalogue cards from the American Library Association Board and began
inserting them into the Library’s card catalogue according to the Dewey
system. With a satisfactory system of cataloguing in place, the next step was to begin
expanding the Library’s collections.
|