Browser brief
Preserving National Memories
by
Karen Williams
We Australians can be a strange lot. We celebrate bushrangers, but many of us
cannot name the first Prime Minister. But all is not lost. Collecting and making
documentary resources of national significance accessible is just one of the
functions of the National Library of Australia (NLA), the country's largest
reference library. The NLA's collections of Australiana have developed into the
nation's single most important resource of materials recording Australian
cultural heritage. This particular site deals solely with Australian history. It
has a reference library; links to historical documents online, including the
Constitution and a rare maps digitisation project; links to Australian
institutions with important collections of historical documents; links to
overseas sources that contain collections of documents of importance to the
Australian historian; information about Indigenous history sources, and much
more. Included are links to Trenches on the Web – an excellent site for the
study of World War 1, with a special ANZAC memories section. Also of note is a
link to a convict research site, and the Australian Transportation Records – an
index to the records of those transported to Australia from Ireland.