Today's Mission: Sign up for every library service in Victoria.

I absolutely realise that I may be being a bit of a menace in doing this, but I’m bored and feel like doing a project. It’s fun to collect and who knows what’ll happen.

Plus, what’s the worst that happens? I inspire other people to try the same and end up drawing more interest in public library services? As two ex-girlfriends-who-are-librarians have told me, more memberships and use usually leads to more funding.

Quick background on the “Why”

I just finished watching the new Dune movie (one minute review over here) and wanted to read the first book in the series, or rather listen to the first audiobook. But alas, it’s not actually in stock at my local service in Brimbank. Here’s the problem:

The long story short is that in Victoria, there are many many different regions usually defined by council area. Here’s a set of diagrams I found on the plv.org.au site which signifies the amount of services geographically in Victoria.

and here’s a sort of inner city level library region map.

And each one of these regions has its own library service with each library service having its own unique catalogue. What may be available at the Hume Library Service will have huge but not total overlap with what would be available at say Moonee Valley Library Service. In the example below we can see a good example of that, while most areas excel at local history based collections, the service for where I’m based (Brimbank) is lacking.

Let’s do this.

Luckily, I’m not going to have to go and compile a list of every single service in the state, I found that and all of the above information in this PDF. Here’s a total list of all 50 services as of this very date (2024-03-17) and in table form. I did have to go ahead and find each url though, which was a bit of a hassle.

I think I’m going to start by tracking which cards or memberships I have and then adding to the column each time I obtain a new one.

I already had two cards in both Melbourne and Brimbank, so those have been checked off, meaning I’m already 4% of the way done! Given I got each of those cards roughly 10 years ago, which means at that rate we’re looking at an ETA of 240 more years to complete this endeavour… oh dear what have I gotten myself into.

I’ll leave additional notes below if and when I complete procurement of each membership haha