Frequently asked questions
Library membership is free for residents of New South Wales.
To join, simply go to your nearest library branch. You will need to show proof of name and residential address when joining (e.g. current driver’s licence, health care card, council rate notice, electricity or gas bill etc.).
If you are under 16 years of age you will need a parent or guardian to join on your behalf.
A 'one off' subscription of $18.00, or $14.00 for a concessional membership subscription, applies to members who are non-NSW residents.
Items can be reserved at a cost of $1.50 per item. Payment is taken upon collection.
Alternatively, if you prefer to pick up the item yourself on the same day at another branch, library staff will ring to ensure the item is available to be put aside for you. There is no charge for this service.
Inter-Library Loan requests can be made for some material not held in the library's collection, for a minimum fee of $7.00 per item, to be paid upon collection of item/items.
The inter-library loans staff will confirm if any additional charges are required by the other lending library service.
Notification is sent when the item is available for pickup at your preferred location. The progress of the inter-library loan request can be tracked via My Library.
The first 30 minutes per day is free for library members only, after this the cost is $3.00 per hour. Technology members can access the internet for $4.50 per hour.
Unlimited FREE Internet access is available for emails, banking, government, employment, and educational sites. Internet terminals and free Wi-Fi are available at all three branches; Penrith, St Marys, and St Clair.
The password is your date of birth in the form of an eight digit number, e.g.: 1st January 2000 would be 01012000. If you are still experiencing login difficulties please call the Library for assistance on (02) 4732 7891 during opening hours.
Penrith Library has the Peter Goodfellow Theatrette, and St Marys Library has the William Garner Room which are available for hire. You can either apply online here OR you can call the Library on (02) 4732 7891 during business hours.
In order to place a reservation, you first need to perform a search using the Library Catalogue. As you browse through the records retrieved by your search, you can place a reservation for individual titles or for a set of titles. Please refer to the section on placing reservations in the How To help page for details.
If you can't find the item you are looking for in our collection, we can usually obtain it for you using our Inter-Library Loan (ILL) service. If you think the item you are looking for would be useful to have in the Library, you can make a request for purchase instead. Some charges may apply for these services. You will need to log in to use these services.
Yes you can. Please refer to the section on renewing loans in the Using My Library help page for details.
As you browse through the records in your result set after performing a search in the Library Catalogue, you will notice that some records are displayed with a number of stars. This indicates that one or more reviews have been attached to the record displayed. The number of stars displayed is an average of the ratings given to this record by the reviewers.
Do the following to add your review to a record:
- Retrieve the record you want to add your review to and display in full display.
- Click on the link to Add a review. This will display a form for you to complete.
- Enter your borrower ID and password if you are not already logged in.
- Select the rating you would like to assign.
- Enter your comments. You can enter as much text as you like. Press Enter to start a new paragraph.
- Select the Continue button to submit your review. Your comments will be reviewed by library staff before being made available for general access to others.
You can also amend and delete existing reviews by accessing these records in My account. Please refer to the section on ratings and comments in the Using My Library help page for details.
An alert profile allows you to create a profile that matches your preferences for materials you would like to use. These profiles are scanned as part of the library's overnight housekeeping and any new works that meet the profile's criteria are added to the "profile set" for the particular profile. If any new works are added to your profile set as part of the nightly scan, you will be sent an email containing brief bibliographic details for each work, as well as a hyperlink to the work. When you receive this email, you can click on the hyperlink to go directly to the work and place a reservation against it if you wish.
If you are logged into the library catalogue, your savedlists will not be deleted. They will remain until you decide to remove them.
You can add items to a savedlist if you are not logged in, however this will normally be kept on the system for two days. It will be automatically cleared after this time.
Please refer to the My SavedList help page for more information on how to use this facility.