National Library of Australia

Explore the National Library's digitised Books & Serials

Books

You can now view more than 1700 books, journals and ephemera online, ranging from James Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean and John Gould's Birds of Australia to Dorothy Wall's Blinky Bill and C.J. Dennis’ A Book for Kids. Some rare works from the Library’s Asian Collections are also worth taking a look at, such as the early Korean work on Confucian ethics Samgang haengsil, or Tian fu xia fan zhao shu from the London Missionary Society Collection.

Browse through the Library's Australian or overseas digitised print collections to find other items of interest or view the selection below. To review our progress read Books and Serials digitisation - progress so far and Digitisation - overview.

Newspapers

The National Library, in collaboration with the Australian State and Territory libraries, and with the support of the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation has made available an exciting newservice which provides free online access to selected out of copyright Australian newspapers. The Australian Newspapers service is currently in beta testing phase but users can already search and browse over 2 million articles from over 200 000 newspaper pages dating from 1803 onwards, with more pages added daily. Access is provided to every article, advertisement and illustration on every newspaper page being digitised. See the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program for further details.

Journals and magazines

The Library has commenced working on digitisation of the Australian Women’s Weekly. The project involves digitisation of the magazine from inception to when it changed frequency to monthly, i.e. from 10 June 1933 to 15 December 1982. The magazine will be scanned and processed through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The Library is developing systems to support the workflows and management of the digitised content and make the content available to the public via a search and delivery interface based on the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program system. The project will function as a test-bed to inform the development of an ongoing journal and book digitisation program for the Library in the future.

More Books & Serials

Other online resources

November Curator's Choice

This image was recently identified as the only known vintage print of Roald Amundsen's expedition party honouring the Norwegian flag after arriving at the South Pole. Part of Tasmanian views, Edward Searle's album of photographs of Australia, Antarctica and the Pacific, 1911-1915.