Livestock library: a dream come true

The Livestock Library (http://www.livestocklibrary.com.au/) was the dream of the Australian Sheep Industry Cooperative Research Centre and the Cooperative Research Centre for Beef Genetic Technologies. Their dream was to develop a free to use website that provided access to information of value to all participants in Australia‘s livestock industries – producers, students, extension officers, researchers and teachers. This paper will describe how the Livestock Library developed from being a dream to a reality – a virtual library that provides a single entry point to high quality research and extension information. It is a study of how information seekers with no library resources decided what information they valued and how they would like to access it; then went about developing a service to fulfil these criteria. The challenges faced by a librarian who joined the project when it was at an advanced stage are described, along with the ways in which these challenges were resolved. Although there were plenty of nightmares along the way – issues relating to funding, software, copyright, and seeking a methodology to enable industry-wide searching, the dream has been realised. The Livestock Library is a ―low maintenance‖ service that provides free access to the full text of three major Australian livestock industry conferences, access to articles published in five leading agricultural journals, some dating back to the 1950s, and facilitates access to information on selected high quality industry sites. INTRODUCTION This is the story of a successful information service that has been developed from scratch with a relatively low budget. Its success is due to the enthusiasm and enterprise of information seekers. It is the story of a national information project initiated by agricultural scientists and veterinarians who have a ̳can do‘ attitude and a keen sense of wanting to make valuable information accessible to everyone in their industry. BACKGROUND In the early 2000s researchers affiliated with the Australian Sheep Industry CRC (Sheep CRC) were frustrated by the difficulty they were having accessing Australian livestock research information. Results of Australian research into sheep and wool production (for example, sheep nutrition, lambing rates and wool quality) were difficult to obtain