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Birth of a Library

Birth of a Library
Bush Capital Pioneers
A Great Public Library
Our Heritage Revealed
From the Bush to Beyond
Housing the Collection

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Interior Parliamentary Library, Parliament House Melbourne pre–1927

enlarge imageInterior Parliamentary Library, Parliament House Melbourne pre-1927
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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.

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