Library Catalogue

Information about collection items in the State Library of Victoria is accessible through the Library's online catalogue which provides users with features such as powerful searching capabilities, the ability to place requests for items either for use in the Library on the day of ordering or on a later day, and tools that allow them to keep track of their searches and their requests. (For more information about these features, see Using the Catalogue.)

Contents

The catalogue includes the following: books, journal,magazines and newspapers, video recordings, music, maps, oral history, pictures (photographs, prints, drawings), and Australian manuscript material including documents, papers and records.  Biographical and Victorian local history newspaper articles are accessed via a separate index called the Australiana Index. 

Access

The catalogue and the Australiana Index are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via the Library website.

Technology

The Library's first automated library management system was introduced in 1989, preceding the development of the internet, the widespread use of email and online activities most people now take for granted.

Voyager

In mid 2001 the State Library introduced Voyager (from Ex Libris) as its integrated library management system which provided more advanced functionality for both users and Library staff as well as being accessible via the web. 

Voyager was also chosen by hundreds of academic and research libraries worldwide such as the National Library of Scotland, National Library of New Zealand, the Library of Congress (the world's largest library), and Cornell and Northwestern universities in the US. In Australia, a number of Australia's largest libraries used Voyager including Monash University, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of Queensland, the Australian Defence Force Academy, and the CSIRO.

Primo

In late 2009, the Library introduced a new style of resource disovery using the Primo software from Ex Libris. Primo harvests metadata and indexes from the underlying Voyager catalogue and enables search engine style searching across all the Library's collections in one easy, powerful search. It also offers a range of new features such as user-contributed tags, comments and reviews. It also provides improved searching for articles allowing users to search across several eJournal databases simultaneously.

Many libraries around the world are now using Primo including the University of Iowa, the State Library of Queensland and the British Library. 

Voyager continues to provide the more-traditional style of interface to the catalogue (now known as our Classic Catalogue Search) and to the Australiana Index. It also manages the behind-the-scenes library collection management activities such as acquisitions, cataloguing and reporting. It also enables the Library to keep track of the location and status of vast number of collection items and to efficiently manage the large number of requests for items received every day of the week. 

Technical information is available for Z39.50 implementors who wish to access our Voyager Z39.50 servers.