General facts about the National Library of Australia

NLA factsheet - PDF version

General Facts
Our revenue for 2009-2010 is estimated at $62 million:
$50 million (80%) government appropriation
$12 million external revenue ($7.1m sale of goods and services including $4m Libraries Australia revenue; $2.5m in goods received free of charge on legal deposit; $1.5m bank interest; and $0.9m in other revenue including grants and donations)

Our expenses in 2009-2010 are estimated to be $62 million including:
$35 million (56%) salaries
$18.8 million supplier expenses  (IT $1.5m; serials/subscriptions $4.4m; building management $4.1m; contractors $1.9m)
$7.7  million depreciation (mostly used to replace assets — buildings, software, plant and equipment)

We operate out of five buildings:
The main NLA building
Two warehouses at Hume
An exhibitions fabrication workshop at Mitchell
An office in Jakarta within the Australian Embassy

In 2008-2009 Library staff averaged 477 employees (equal to 432 full-time staff).  69% of staff are female; 29% of staff have been in the Library for at least 15 years; the average age of staff is 44 years.  The Library also has a volunteer program which currently has 70 volunteers.

558,000 local, interstate and international visitors came through the Library’s doors in 2008-2009.

The Friends of the National Library is an active group with 2012 members. Significant Friends events include the annual Kenneth Myer Lecture, which in 2009 was be delivered by Professor Ian Frazer and the Friend’s Celebration of a significant Australian, which in 2009 will be of Ita Buttrose.

For the 2008-2009 year the usage of the Library’s website was over 156 million page views, a 63 per cent increase over the previous year.

Facts on the Library’s Collections
There are approximately 9 million items (including an estimated 2 million manuscripts items and 2 million serials volumes) in the Library’s collection.

Each year the Library receives 185,000 issues of journals and newspapers and 50,000 books. In addition the Library acquires manuscripts, paintings, photographs, musical scores, oral histories and maps.

In 2007-2008 the Library received 19,213 new titles on legal deposit.

As at June 2009, the proportion of the National Library’s collection currently in the online catalogue is 89.2%. A further 1.6% remains in card catalogues, and 9.2% is uncatalogued. The total number of items without online records is now estimated to be ca. 650,000 items (mostly comprising pictures and maps). The Library has an on-going catalogue conversion program.

The Library has undertaken four large scale harvests of the Australian web domain (.au): in June 2005, September 2006, September 2007 and August-September 2008. These harvests have collected a combined total of 2.3 billion files amounting to 79 terabyes of archival data.

At 30 June 2009, 146,037 original items from the Library’s Australian collections had been digitised and made available through the catalogue and other services. We are also undertaking a major newspaper digitisation project; at 30 June 2009 over 520,000 digitised pages were available to the public. The objective is to ensure our business processes are as efficient as possible and we are effective in our service delivery to users by creating a critical mass of works in digital form.

Collection statistics

 

Type of material

2008–2009

Monographs (including microforms, electronic media & ephemera)

3 116 098

Serials, Current

43 806

Serials, Non-current

151 131

Total serials (including newspapers)

194 937

Manuscripts (measured in metres)

14 225

Oral History recordings

17 789

Music scores

200 092

Paintings, drawings, prints

75 307

Photographs

772 420

Maps

677 951

Aerial photographs

860 231

Digitised collection items

146 037

Total *

6 060 862

* Totals do not include manuscripts, which are measured in metres.

Facts on Access

There are currently seven reading rooms, namely the Main Reading Room, Newspaper & Microform Reading Room, Petherick Reading Room (a facility for advanced researchers, those using rare or vulnerable materials and for after hours use of special collections) the Pictures, Maps, Manuscripts and Asian Collections reading rooms.  The separate Oral History reading room was closed in 2002 with services now delivered through the Petherick Reading Room. We are planning further reading room integration associated with a master building plan and the development of a Treasures Gallery on the ground floor.

295,511 items in the physical collection were delivered to users either on site through the reading rooms or via inter-library loan in 2008-2009. 

In 2008-2009, 48,818 reference enquiries were answered, including over 3,000 queries via the collaborative AskNow service administered by the Library.

Usage of our online collections increases each year. In 2008-2009 there were 10.9 million collection transactions across PANDORA, our digitised collections and our free and subscribed electronic journals.

140 computers are available for the public use in the reading rooms. All reading rooms are wireless enabled and this service is heavily used with up to 100 concurrent laptop users active at any time.

The Main and Petherick Reading Rooms are open 68 hours, 7 days; the Newspaper & Microform Reading Room is open 48 hours a week on 6 days and the special collections reading rooms are open Monday to Friday 9-5. The Library’s reading rooms are closed only on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and Good Friday. There were 690,108 entries to the Main and Newspapers and Microforms Reading Rooms in 2008-09.

At the end of June 2009, the Library had 57,029 active registered users. The total number of new registered users in 2008-2009 was 25,802 with the exceptional rise in registrations over previous years attributed to the introduction of online registration.

In 2008-2009, 61,325 people visited the Library’s onsite exhibitions and there were over 3 million page views on our online exhibitions.

Over 26,000 people participated in Library events and education activities in 2008-2009.                                                    


 

 

 

Back to the top