The Extraordinary and the Ephemeral: Rare books of the PMI Victorian History Library
Melbourne Rare Book Week Event
Thursday 11 July, 7PM

The Prahran Mechanics’ Institute was founded in 1854 and in the last 165 years it has accumulated a collection that not only covers the history of Victoria but contains many hidden gems. Come along as Collections Librarian Ellen Coates takes you through the treasures of the collection.

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.

Heritage and Conservation Studies

Councils across Victoria release heritage studies about localities under their purview.

We collect these studies and store them on the library computers for easy access.

Heritage studies can be a fantastic primary source for any type of locality based research, as they can give the minute small scale detail that is just not available in larger more general works. Heritage studies can be found in the heritage studies folder on the library computers

Historical Society and Interstate Journals

We collect and index journals from all historical societies in Victoria. Indexing means that every relevant historical article in these journals is fully searchable on our catalogue. These journals cover an astounding array of minutia from their communities’ histories and there is nowhere else this sort of information is available. It is the small scale of history that is not covered in books and in more general resources.

We also hold general interstate journals from society's such as the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, the Genealogy Society’s, the Art Deco Society, the Journal of Australian Ephemera and Newsrail.

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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