Recently I had a query from a history postgrad who wanted to physically browse the Horrie Brown collection. For future reference, I replied to her more or less as follows…

The Horrie Brown collection is a bit of a can of worms. There is no one location for the whole collection – most are in storage, but some specific items are on the open shelves and treated as normal borrowable books, eg:

Australian trade with Middle East and North African countries : basic statistics: shelved on level 10 at HF 275 .A938 m.

Tim O’Sullivan says that those in storage are only available on request, i.e. students can’t browse them on the shelves, but library staff will retrieve the specific requested items. As they are currently in two different storage locations, there are two ways of requesting them:

(1) If the cat. record says:
Collection: Central Library Horrie Brown Colln – Ask at Help Desk:
Request these using a white request card available from the help desk.

(2) If the cat. record says:
Collection: Storage Please use the ABOVE linked form to request this item:
Request these using the Online request form link.

Obviously students need to find what they want using the catalogue. The easiest way to browse the catalogue is to enter in Author alphabetical: horrie brown. This brings up over 5000 results in a very long and unwieldy list.

You can do more specific searches by using the Keywords index, eg. enter:
– horrie brown trade
– horrie brown (nsw or new south wales)

You could also use one of the Subject indexes (or Keywords) and enter:
– australia parliament

Use the Call Number (local) index to browse items which have call numbers in the format beginning with eg. N.S.W. Parlt. Papers, or: Comm. Parlt. Papers. Enter that in Call Number (local) to retrieve a list looking like this:

3.
Comm. Parlt. papers
Teaching of migrant languages in schools : report of the Committee.
Australia. Parliament.

4.
Comm. Parlt. papers
Annual report /
Australia. Parliament.

5.
Comm. Parlt. papers 1
Report /
Australia. Parliament.