General facts about the National Library of Australia

NLA factsheet - PDF version

Our revenue for 2007-2008 is estimated at $72.5 million:

  • $58.6 million (81%) government appropriation
  • $13.9 million external revenue (including $3.1m interest, $3.9m Libraries Australia revenueand $2.6m in goods received free of charge on legal deposit and Cultural Gifts to the Australian Special Collections)

Our expenses in 2007-2008 are estimated to be $71.2 million:

  • $33.3 million salaries
  • $18.7 million supplier expenses
  • $19.2 million depreciation (mostly used to replace assets, collections, software, plant and equipment)

We operate out of five buildings:

  • The main NLA building
  • 2 warehouses (Hume)
  • 1 exhibitions fabrication workshop (Mitchell)
  • Office in Jakarta (within the Australian Embassy)

In 2006-2007 averaged 479 employees (equal to 445 full time staff).   71% of staff are female; 25% of staff have been in the Library for at least 15 years; the average age of staff is 45.  The Library also has a volunteer program which currently has 80 volunteers.

532,000 local, interstate and international visitors came through the Library’s doors in 2006-2007.

The Friends of the National Library is an active group with 1800 members. Events this year include the annual Kenneth Myer Lecture which was delivered by Michelle Grattan and the Friend’s Celebration of Margaret Fulton.

For the 2006-2007 year the usage of the Library’s website was 140 million page views, a 27 per cent increase over the previous year.

Over $8.1m worth of media coverage was achieved in 2006-2007.

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 120,000 journal issues, 70,000 newspaper issues, and 45,000 books. In addition the Library acquires incoming collections of manuscripts, paintings, photographs and maps.

In 2006-2007 the Library received 19,659 new titles on legal deposit. There has been a slight decline in print publishing, most noticeable for government publications, maps and serials.

As at June 2007, the proportion of the National Library’s collection currently in the online catalogue is 87.6%.  A further 1.8% remains in card catalogues, and 10.6% is uncatalogued. The total number of items without online records is now estimated to be ca. 727,000 items (mostly comprising pictures and maps). The Library has an on-going catalogue conversion program.

The Library has undertaken two harvests of websites across the whole of the Australian domain: in June 2005 the harvest collected 185 million unique documents. The second harvest in September 2006 collected over 500 million unique documents.

126,919 original items from the Library’s Australian collections have been digitised and made available through the catalogue and other services, for example Picture Australia. 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 # of items # of images
Australian – books & serials 1,253 11,787
Overseas – books & serials 362 21,177
Maps 7,019 12,573
Manuscripts 8,869 46,773
Music 10,640 91,232
Pictures 98,776 149,581
TOTAL 126,919 333,123

Our major priority for digitisation over the next few years is out-of-copyright Australian newspapers and the web delivery of digital/digitised oral history and folklore recordings.

Our priority for overseas collecting is to obtain as many resources as possible in electronic form. Several major collections have been purchased over the last two years, including Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Early English Books Online, Early American Newspapers and Early American Imprints series 2.

The size of the collection requires that some items are stored offsite in purpose built storage facilities. These facilities store material on high rise shelving over 6 metres high and staff use a stockpicker (special forklift) to retrieve this material. Material from the off-site storage facilities is delivered to the Main Library building within 90 minutes.

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.

325,592 items in the physical collection were delivered to users either onsite through the reading rooms or via inter-library loan in 2006-2007.

Use of the Library’s reference specific websites (for example, Frequently Asked Questions and Internet subject guides) totalled 1,454,301 pageviews in 2006-2007.

Approximately 45,000 reference enquiries are answered each year, including around 4,600 queries via Ask Now.

Usage of our online collections increases each year. In 2006-2007 there were 12.7 million collection transactions across PANDORA, our digitised collections and our free and subscribed electronic journals.

100 computers are available for the public with the recently introduced wireless service in the Main Reading Room being particularly popular for those with laptops. All reading rooms are wireless enabled and there are over 2000 registered wireless users. A recent survey of wireless use showed up to 67 concurrent users at any time.

The Main and Petherick Reading Rooms are open 68 hours, 7 days; the Newspaper & Microform Reading Room is open 64 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

The Library has 45,000 registered users, although many of these are not regular users.

A 2003 survey of the Main Reading Room showed that 35 per cent of users are between 16 and 24 years old; 30 per cent are between 25 and 49; and 35 per cent are over 50 years old.

In 2006-2007 66,000 people visited the Library’s onsite exhibitions and there were over 1.6 million pageviews on our online exhibitions. The National Treasures From Australia’s Great Libraries exhibition which completed a national tour to all capital cities in September 2007, was viewed by 420,000 visitors.

Over 43,000 people participated in Library events and education activities in 2006-2007.

Collaborative services

Libraries Australia 

From February 2006, searching Libraries Australia has been free to the public. In 2006-2007 there were 12.6 million searches on Libraries Australia, of which 13% were via the free public search interface. Users can search for about 42 million items in the collections of over 800 Australian libraries.  

Music Australia

Launched in 2005, MusicAustralia is a free service that provides access to over 220,000 Australian music resources held in music collections across Australia, including more than 60,000 items available online.  During 2006-2007 there were over 13 million pageviews of Music Australia.

Australia Dancing

The Australia Dancing portal, also hosted by the National Library of Australia, provides access to both current and historical information about dance in Australia.

Picture Australia

PictureAustralia provides access to 1.4 million images relating to Australia with contributions by 50 participating organisations across the country and the National Library of New Zealand. In January 2006 the National Library entered into a partnership with Yahoo!7 to increase the number of contemporary images held in PictureAustralia. Since that time more than 20,000 images have been lodged through a photograph sharing website called Flickr.

PANDORA

PANDORA: Australia’s Web Archive ensures long-term access to selected Australian online publications of national significance. As at 26 June 2007, 12,949 titles have been collected.

Collaboration and representation

National activities

The Library hosts an annual meeting of peak library bodies to discuss issues of mutual interest and to agree on collaborative action at the national level. State libraries are represented by the Chair of NSLA. The most recent meeting of peak bodies was held on 7 May 2007.

The Community Heritage Grants Program (CHG) is administered by the Library. Funds are also contributed by the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts; National Archives of Australia; National Film and Sound Archive and the National Museum of Australia. CHG distributes grants of up to $15,000 to assist community organisations to preserve their nationally significant cultural heritage collections. The program has been operating for twelve years and has distributed over $2m to 505 organisations.

The Library is often sought as a partner by the university sector for Australian Research Council funded projects and other projects funded by the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST).

ARC projects that we are currently contributing to include The Ballets Russes in Australia; Australian Dictionary of Biography Online and the Cultural Collections, Creators and Copyright project. While not a project partner, the Library contributes funding to AUSTLIT and a member of staff attends board meetings.

We are currently participating in several collaborative activities aimed at improving Australia’s research information infrastructure:

  • ARROW led by Monash University (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World): the Library has developed the ARROW Resource Discovery service which provides federated access to Australian university repositories
  • APSR (Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories): the Library is advising on a strategy for including preservation metadata in repositories and is working on tools to alert repository managers to obsolescent file formats

International activities

The Library is represented on a number of international standards bodies and organisations, including:

  • Conference of Directors of National Libraries
  • Conference of Directors of National Libraries of Asia and Oceania
  • LC MARC 21 Advisory Committee
  • Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR2
  • Standards Australia and New Zealand IT/19 Committee
  • IFLA Preservation and Conservation committee
  • IFLA Document Delivery and Resource Sharing Group
  • IFLA National Libraries Section
  • IFLA Regional Section for Asia/Oceania
  • IFLA-CDNL Alliance for Bibliographic Standards
  • International Association of Sound Archivists-Technical Committee
  • International Internet Preservation Consortium

The Library is a regional centre for IFLA’s Preservation and Conservation Division (IFLAPAC). We also assist national libraries (or major libraries where no national library exists) within the Asia/pacific region on an ad hoc basis. This year we are assisting the national library in the Solomon Islands and the Dili Institute of Technology.

25 October 2007

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