Melbourne Tartan Festival 2019
We are running two events to help celebrate the Melbourne Tartan Festival. Dr James Donaldson will be giving a talk on the decline of the Gaelic language and running a workshop on Scottish family history.

Victorian History Showcase over 2 days!
The Friends of the PMI Library are excited to be hosting this two day history showcase exhibiting a number of historical societies from around Victoria, as part of the PMI’s 165th birthday celebrations and National Family History Month.

Railways/Transport History

Our railway and transport collection is growing all the time, and soon members will have access to the library of the Australian Railway Historical Society as well.

Our collection is extensive in its own right. Everything from histories of specific lines, to more general company histories, to history of bus lines and car manufacturers.

So whether you’re simply a railways and transport fan, or you’re researching a location, the PMI’s railway and transport collection can help.

Image: © Steven Haby Collection

Town History

The core of the PMI’s collection is its selection of books on individual towns in Victoria and wider Australia. We hold books on the vast majority of towns in Victoria and a growing collection of books in interstate towns. Histories of towns and institutions within towns, such as churches and schools, not only give an excellent impression of what the town was like, they also often include information on the townspeople and institutions.

The PMI is the only institution that is actively collecting these resources to ensure that the history of Victoria and interstate towns are preserved.

Image: www.slv.vic.gov.au

The PMI Victorian History Library has more than 30,000 books for loan and a professional information service for our members, we provide a central resource for research into the history of Victoria. We hold many titles that are unavailable elsewhere. It is the only lending collection of its kind in Australia that is available for loan to the general public.

Electronic Databases
Electronic databases are often overlooked, and the PMI’s collection can provide a myriad of information. They range from directories like the Sands and McDougall’s directories which cover addresses in first Melbourne and then Victoria, to hospital indexes, to registries for example cemetery burial registries from a wide variety of Victorian cemeteries, to gazettes for example the police gazette, which covers all sorts of ways that people came into contact with the law. These are just examples of some of these sorts of resources and they can be invaluable as they can give you firsthand primary information.

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