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 all information of value to 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.

This will be 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.

There have been 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 1950, and facilitates access to information on selected high quality industry sites. All information retrieved on the Livestock Library should be available in full text, and at a single sitting.