Introducing Collection Discovery, a new way of exploring curated collections of material digitised by the Library.
We began digitising our collections early on in the digital age, in 1993. Since then, we have digitised more than 770,000 Library items, including photographs, maps, 19th-century pamphlets, glass plate negatives and rare artworks on paper. Collection Discovery allows you to browse a selection of our most popular digitised collections.
What might you discover?
Explore Collection Discovery to find some of our earliest and most intriguing collections and view them for free from home. Featuring all your favourites from our Popular Digitised Collections page, including Sands & McDougall’s Directories, Football Record and Records of Coles Myer.
Collection Discovery also includes the Herald Sun from 30 June 2014 until 2 December 2018, however this publication is only available onsite within the Library.
How to use Collection Discovery
Get started by visiting our Popular Digitised Collections page (on our website under Search & Discover), or look for COLLECTION DISCOVERY (BETA) in the catalogue menu:
Collections are organised into sub-collections that order material by date or themes. Navigate through these collections by clicking on thumbnails to view contents. At the item level, clicking on a thumbnail will open an item’s catalogue record.
Catalogue records for these items now feature a Collection path at the bottom of the Details section, allowing you to easily view other items in the same collection via Collection Discovery:
Collection Discovery includes a curated section of popular content. To browse even more collections and online images, search the catalogue or explore our digital image pool.
For more information about using and acknowledging content from our digitisation projects, read credits and copyright notices.
Share your thoughts
This is our Beta launch of Collections Discovery, which means we’re still improving it. You may notice some initial issues with slow loading times and searching. You can visit Library Systems Status for details and to share your feedback.
Is there going to any capacity to search within titles, in the same way as Trove? Or will they be added to Trove? I would like to search in say Mufti or Australian Bicycling News. I would be less interested in slogging through them page by page.
Thanks for the question, Lenore. Unfortunately at this stage there is no option to perform a single search of content across all titles, but you can search within individual titles by downloading their full PDF and using Adobe search options. All titles featured in Collections Discovery are searchable via the State Library catalogue and each collection title has been added to Trove as well. (See catalogue results for Australian Bicycling News.)
Presently you can search works at the item level, but not within top-level collections or sub-collections. We recommend using the catalogue to search across collections instead. Visit the Library System Status for updates.
We welcome any additional feedback you might have, and I hope that helps in the meantime.