What do Deakin University, National Library of Australia, Kingston Information and Library Service and Zenith Management Services have in common? -The are the four organisations topping their sectors in the number of searches against Libraries Australia databases.

The Libraries Australia annual report for 2007/08 is now available. While annual reports are not exactly exciting reading there are some interesting facts and figures to be gleaned from them. In this one I learned that:

• The Australian National Bibliographic Database is the most heavily used of the Libraries Australia (LA) databases with over 12 million searches in 2007-08
• With WorldCat opened to all LA members at the beginning of 2007 searching against that database increased by 31 times the number of previous year’s searches to almost 850,000. Thank you LA for making this arrangement with OCLC to make WorldCat available. It was clearly a good move for LA members who wanted more than they could get from the free WorldCat search on the web.
• There are now more than 1250 members of LA – but it doesn’t state how many are individuals vs. institutions.

If you want to find out more about Libraries Australia the annual report is worth dipping into.