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Australian Libraries
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Starting Points
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| Useful starting points for those interested in Australian
libraries:
Our professional body - the Australian
Library and Information Association (ALIA)
The National Library of Australia website presents a wealth of information and links to resources
The Australian
Libraries Gateway, hosted by the National Library of Australia
The Aurora Foundation, which provides leadership training for Australian and New Zealand librarians.
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Australian Library Collections
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Search the combined catalogues of Australian libraries: Libraries Australia.
Libraries Australia enables anyone to search the combined catalogues of Australian libraries - national, state, public, university, TAFE, special and government - with one search. Over 1,000 Australian libraries contribute information to this database, which is managed and supported by the National Library of Australia. The database lists more than 40 million items including books, maps, pictures, journals, films and videos, CDs, DVDs, government reports, newspapers, talking books, and musical scores. The service supports 'finding and getting', and resource sharing and inter-library lending among libraries to meet their patrons' requests. It provides a range of options to assist searchers access these library resources.
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Picture Gallery
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Our gallery of pictures of library buildings, to which we add new images from time to time.
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On Libraries and librarians
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'Librarians can no longer survive, but they still
may prevail. Tomorrow may not find them called librarians, but it
should still find them pursuing their calling - the goal of providing
knowledge to all who need it, the duty to defend the quality and value
of information, the task of caring for the ignorant.'
(Barbara Quint, Searcher (1994), recorded in The Quintessential
Searcher, edited by M. Block. Information Today, Inc, 2001, p. 73)
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'Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.'
(Germaine Greer, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, Fawcett Columbine, 1989, p. 70)
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| 'A library is thought in cold storage.'
Herbert Samuel, A Book of Quotations (1947), p. 10
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From fiction:
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'He walked on. The old limestone building was a library. "That's OK", he thought. "Librarians are nice people. They tell you things, if you ask them."'
(Jack Reacher, in
Lee Child, One Shot, Bantam Press, 2005, p. 55)
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'So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing?
After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find out what she could on ...'
(Dave Robicheaux, in James Lee Burke, Last Car to Elysian Fields, Orion, 2003, p. 103)
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' Duncan walked to the comsole, and the screen became alive as his fingers brushed the ON pad. Now it was a miracle beyond the dreams of any poet, a charm'd magic casement, opening on all seas, all lands. Through this window could flow everything that Man had ever learned about his universe, and every work of art he had saved from the dominion of Time. All the libraries and museums that ever existed could be funnelled through the screen, and the millions like it scattered over the face of the Earth. Even the least sensitive of men could be overwhelmed by the thought that one could operate a comsole for a thousand lifetimes -- and barely sample the knowledge stored within the memory banks that lay triplicated in their widely separated caverns, more securely guarded than any gold. There was an appropriate irony in the fact that two of these buried complexes had once been control centres for nuclear missiles.'
(Arthur C. Clarke, Imperial Earth, Pan Books, 1977, p. 146. First published by Victor Gollancz in 1975.)
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