City of Sydney Library - History

History

A free public lending library service has existed in Sydney since 1877 when the New South Wales state government opened a lending branch of the State Library of New South Wales on Macquarie Street. By the end of the same year there were over one thousand registered borrowers. In 1899 the lending library moved to the second floor of the Queen Victoria Building and in 1909 control passed from State to the City of Sydney Council. In 1918 the library moved again, this time to the old concert hall of the Queen Victoria Building. This provided space for a separate children's library to open in the same year. The first branch libraries opened in 1949 which also provided book deposit stations at a number of local schools. In 1970, the City library moved to yet larger premises within the Queen Victoria Building before taking up residence on Pitt Street in 1984. High rent fees prompted it to move again in 1994 to Town Hall House. In 2005 the Town Hall branch moved to its current location at Customs House at Circular Quay.

Read more about this topic:  City Of Sydney Library

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.”
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    I saw the Arab map.
    It resembled a mare shuffling on,
    dragging its history like saddlebags,
    nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.
    Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)

    The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)