Collection
The State Reference Library contains a comprehensive and diverse collection of Australian and international research material. A number of specialist services are located within the State Reference Library, including the Legal Information Access Centre, Health Information Service and Family History Service. The library contains over 5 million items including more than 2 million books, 1.2 million microforms, 1.1 million photographs, as well as newspapers, maps, architectural plans, manuscripts and other items.
As well as being a general purpose reference and research library, it contains many historically significant collections dating from the European colonisation of Australia, including accounts from Australian explorers and other pioneers, paintings and sketches, and many other historical records. These are held in the Australiana research collections known as the Mitchell Library (named for David Scott Mitchell, first collector of Australiana) which is continually being added to and the Dixson Library (named after Sir William Dixson), Dixson's personal collection which is not added to. Both are housed within the State Library precinct. The collections grow through purchase, other acquisitions of material and legal deposit for all books published in New South Wales.
Recent acquisitions include 201 personal letters of surveyor John Septimus Roe (1797–1878) and the Edward Close sketchbook (1817–1818).
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—18th-century Scottish proverb, collected in James Kelly, Complete Collection of Scottish Proverbs, no. 351 (1721)
“What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings—they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong.”
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—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)