The University of Melbourne and its library: facts, figures and a few pictures

The University of Melbourne was founded in 1853. Today it has 47,000 students and 6,500 staff. The university offers 10 undergraduate degrees and 270 graduate courses, at 22 discipline-specific faculties and graduate schools. About 25% students are international students and they come from 130 countries.
The University of Melbourne also has eight Nobel Laureates who have taught, studied and researched at the university of Melbourne.




The latest Nobel Prize winner was Professor Elizabeth Blackburn who got the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009.  Nobel Prize winner Professor Peter Doherty (he got the prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1996) still teaches/researches at the university.




 
The University of Melbourne has 13 libraries across six campuses. These libraries provide access to more than 3,6 million items, including e-books, maps, videos, music, archives etc.
You can book more than 400 PCs and there are about 6,000(?) study places offered.
The library has produced a very well designed Library Guide (print brochure) that includes all necessary information about the library in a nutshell. I have a copy, so please ask me to show you if you are interested (colleagues at NTNU!). But you can also have a look at it online:  http://library.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/2104378/Library_Guide_2016_S2_v4-online-version-12.pdf


An interesting and unusual thing is that the library - after a restructure some years ago - is not called library anymore, at least not in the organisational chart of the university. However on the university's homepage it's still called Library :-)
The University Library - as mentioned, NOT called library in the official chart - comprises the two directorates of Scholarly Information and Research and Collections, and these directorates are under the Deputy Head of University Services and Registrar, together with seven other directorates (i.e. for Student Success, Student Enrolment or Learning Environments).
Strategic leadership is provided by the University Librarian and Executive Director, Collections. That means the university librarian is not part of the library anymore, but belongs to the Chancellery. So he is a rather distant figure I was told.

Of course the branch libraries are still called libraries and today I was mainly in the Baillieu Library (for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences).



More about research support and teaching support in other blog posts. Until then you can find more information on the library's webpage:  http://library.unimelb.edu.au/