University of Western Australia Library

When the University of Western Australia began teaching students in 1913 and the first building was constructed at the Irwin Street site, just £2000 was set aside for the purchase of roughly 100 books.[1] By the time the campus moved to Crawley, there were over 10,000 volumes and a dedicated librarian.

The next thirty years saw steady but modest growth in the collections. Library services at Crawley initially operated out of the Main Library which was set up in a wing of the Administration building (now the Visitors Centre). By the early 1960s, overcrowding had become a significant issue leading to the Winthrop Hall Undercroft being enclosed and then re-opened as a temporary library annex consisting of the Reserve collection for undergraduates and bound volumes of periodicals. It was not until Leonard Jolley became the University Librarian in 1959 that the Library began to expand its collections rapidly, to experiment with new forms of information technology, to erect major new library buildings, and to bring departmental libraries under central responsibility.

A Music branch library had been set up as early as 1935, many years before the UWA Music department was established. In the 1960s, the library was named the Wigmore Music Library following substantial gifts from violinist Alice Ivy Wigmore in honor of her mother.[2] A purpose-built building for the Wigmore Music Library was opened in 1976, including discussion rooms and areas for informal study. This library building was repurposed in 2020 by the UWA Conservatorium of Music as a space for practice and performance, and is now called the Wigmore Music Studio.[3] The Music Library collection, now housed in Reid Library, includes scores, performing editions of musical works, sound-recordings, DVDs/videos, reference books, and scholarly journals.

Technological improvements became even more significant in the 1980s as Arthur Ellis, Jolley's successor as University Librarian, worked to expand the collections of audio-visual and electronic materials and began the process of computerising the Library's catalogues.[4]

By 2000, the Library consisted of 11 library sites. The 2000s–2010s saw the introduction of online information literacy delivery, a Course Materials Online (CMO) service and the launch of OneSearch, the Library’s single search tool for finding books, journal articles and online resources.

A steady increase in the number of UWA students owning laptops and tablets resulted in demand for student IT support and for the first time in Semester 1, 2013, students could go to the information desks in the libraries for assistance with Pheme passwords, Unifi connections, Learning Management System (LMS) troubleshooting, online class registrations (OLCR) and other university applications and systems.[5]

There have been six university librarians at UWA since 1927 when Malvina Evelyn Wood became the first female university librarian in Australia.

• Malvina Evelyn Wood (1927 – 1959)
• Leonard Jolley (1959 – 1979)
• Arthur Ellis (1980 – 1995)
• John Arfield (1996 – 2010)
• Dr Mary Davies (2010 – 2014)
• Jill Benn (2014 – present)

The Library's Special Collections[7] are housed on the second floor of the Reid Library building and focus on Australian literature and the history of the Indian Ocean Region. The Australian literature collection includes more than 700 volumes of poetry by Western Australian writers and personal papers from many well-known Australian authors including A.B. Facey, Arthur Upfield, Robert Drewe, John Kinsella, Tracy Ryan, Dave Warner, Dennis Haskell and Peter Cowan. The archives of the literary magazine Westerly are also available.

Special Collections houses many rare materials including the papers of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville which contain more than 2,000 pages of correspondence and documents relating to the East India Company and Indian trade in the later 18th century, and an original 1650 map of the southern ocean, Polus Antarcticus by Dutch cartographer Jan Jansson.

The Indian Ocean collections also include the Frank Broeze Memorial Library which contains a considerable amount of Dutch and German material on maritime history and shipping, and the Erulkar Collection focused on the history of the Eastern Indian Ocean region, especially the maritime history of India.

The Friends of the UWA Library held their inaugural meeting in Winthrop Hall on July 25, 1965. Later that year, Sir Walter Murdoch became the patron and they hosted their first talk with Mr G.G. Allen presenting on 'Old Books in a Modern Library'. Over the years, the Friends have been supporters of the Library and have donated many rare and valuable items for Special Collections in the Reid Library.

The Library developed and manages the UWA Research Repository which is an open access platform to capture, store, index, and distribute globally a wide range of research outputs produced by the University's researchers and postgraduate students. It contains peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, books, conference papers and creative works as well as UWA theses (masters and doctorate degrees by research).

The Library (previously, as Information Services) developed two digital services for the management of research data:

• The Institutional Research Data Store (IRDS) provides researchers with a centralised, secure and UWA-supported data storage facility in which to store electronic research data, enabling ongoing access to these assets. This service is now managed by Information Governance Services (IGS); and
• Research Data Online (RDO) provides open or mediated access to research datasets held at the University of Western Australia.

• Official website
• facebook.com
• twitter.com
• youtube.com
• AustLit
• Australian Data Archive