From Page to Pixel

What makes a book special? It isn’t just age; it’s a combination of rarity, publication date, and size of the edition. Together, these factors elevate these items from texts in the general collection out on the open shelves to valuable materials that require specialised care and display.

UNSW Library holds a collection of rare and valuable books that make up the Special Collections, with strengths in the history of Australian science, medicine, natural history and architecture. This collection encompasses 13,890 titles, totalling over 22,000 items, including more than 4,000 titles that are the only copies held in Australia.

In an effort to make our Special Collections more visible, UNSW Library is digitising select volumes. Reproductions of these materials can be viewed on display in the Postgraduate study space and accessed through the Library’s Digital Collections.

The inaugural display in the Postgraduate study space, launched in September 2026, includes reproductions of plates depicting Australian flora and fauna from G.R. Waterhouse's A Natural History of the Mammalia, Volume I (1846). Volume I focuses entirely on the order Marsupialia, or pouched animals. This display will be updated biennially.

The author, George Robert Waterhouse (1810-1888), was an English mammalogist, entomologist, and friend of the English naturalist, Charles Darwin, who wrote a favourable review of Volume I for the Annals and Magazine of Natural History (1847), praising Waterhouse's anatomical descriptions.

The five plates selected by the Special Collections & Exhibitions Team for display in the Postgraduate study space feature hand-coloured illustrations of koalas, kangaroos, and other pouched mammals.