The National Library of Australia is deeply grateful for the commitment of the Albanese Government to provide significant ongoing and indexed funding for Australia’s cultural and historical institutions. This allows the Library to focus on providing world-leading services to the Australian community from our physical building and storage facilities in Canberra, and via our digital library, Trove. The funding provides certainty and includes:
- Sustainable funding for our core operations, to further develop our collections and outreach activities and the services we provide to communities across Australia.
- Undertake critical ongoing building maintenance to:
- continue replacing the antiquated heating, ventilation and cooling systems
- ensure existing storerooms are watertight
- replace leaking windows, and
- address urgent safety and code compliance requirements.
- Extend our storage repository at Hume to store collection material (currently in rented storage that expires in 2025) with ongoing indexed funding to safely house our physical collection (which grows by approximately two kilometres every year) into the future.
Treasures in our collections include the voices of thousands of Australians, from new migrants to First Nations peoples captured in our oral history collections. It also includes the papers of the first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, the Mabo papers, the Endeavour Journal of Captain James Cook, the first European maps of the Australian coastline and the personal letters, diaries and papers of thousands of famous Australians – so keeping them safe and making them accessible for current and future generations is critical.
