Public libraries in Australia
1,361 branches across 5 states. Free to walk into, warm, and open to anyone — no card needed to sit down.
A library is the daytime half of what this site is for: somewhere to be between checkout and dark, where nobody asks what you are doing there. Only Queensland publishes whether a branch has WiFi, so it is claimed there and nowhere else — the rest almost certainly have it, but their directories never asked.
| State | Branches | What the source publishes |
|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | 423 | Names and locations only. The state gazetteer records where a named library is, not who operates it or when it opens, so a small number of these are university or institute libraries rather than council branches. |
| Victoria | 321 | Names and locations only. Vicmap is a gazetteer of named features, so it does not record who runs a branch or when it opens. |
| Queensland | 336 | The fullest of the five: library service, address, phone, opening hours and whether WiFi is available, from the State Library’s own directory. |
| Western Australia | 235 | Name, street address and phone number. Opening hours are not in the dataset. |
| Tasmania | 46 | Name, address, phone number and a link to each branch’s own page, published by the library service itself. Opening hours are on the branch page rather than in the dataset. |
The three that are missing
South Australia, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory have no statewide public library directory published under a licence that permits republishing. The branches exist and the Public Library Services of the State Library of South Australia, the Northern Territory Library and Libraries ACT know where they are — that data is simply not open, and this site does not republish what it has not been given permission to.
That is the same position South Australia and Tasmania were in for rest areas until their own agencies turned out to publish the places under a licence that permits it. It is worth looking for again here rather than waiting.
Opening hours change with public holidays and staffing, and not every source publishes them at all. Check before you rely on a branch being open.