Vicnet (Victoria's Network) was a business unit of the

State Library of Victoria State Library Victoria (SLV) is the state library of Victoria, Australia. Located in Melbourne, it was established in 1854 as the Melbourne Public Library, making it Australia's oldest public library and one of the first free libraries in the ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

operating between 1994 and 2014. It was an early Australian

internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

that provided website space and training. It was Australia's largest web host for community organisations and projects such as Skills.Net and Libraries Online. The State Library of Victoria closed Vicnet on 31 January 2014.

History

The State Library of Victoria and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) established a joint project to build a web-based publishing service and internet access provider for community organisations in 1993. Vicnet worked with the State and federal government, private providers, the Victorian public library network and community based organisations across Victoria to address Digital Divide issues. Through a range of ICT programs Vicnet drove the roll out of public access internet points across Victoria and in the process connected every library in Victoria to the Internet for public access. To facilitate access, Vicnet staff delivered extensive training/community development programs across Victoria through government funded programs such as the Skills.net program (a program that was responsible for training more than 100,000 Victorians). Additionally Vicnet developed an online publication platform and an extensive web directory for community and other organizations, as well as for members of the general population. Among many hundreds, Vicnet published and trained in the editing for the first web sites for the

Melbourne International Comedy Festival The Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) is the largest stand-alone comedy festival and the second-largest international comedy festival in the world. Established in 1987, it takes place annually in Melbourne over four weeks, typicall ...

, the Melbourne Formula One Grand Prix, the Indigenous Flora and Fauna Society, the Council on the Ageing (Victoria),

The Age ''The Age'' is a daily newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, that has been published since 1854. Owned and published by Nine Entertainment, ''The Age'' primarily serves Victoria (Australia), Victoria, but copies also sell in Tasmania, the Austral ...

newspaper, and the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet. With government assistance from Multimedia Victoria, Vicnet provided internet access to regional Victorian communities then out of the reach of any internet service, such as

Mallacoota Mallacoota is a small town in the East Gippsland region in the state of Victoria, Australia. At the 2016 census, Mallacoota had a population of 1,063. At holiday times, particularly Easter and Christmas, the population increases by about 8,000 ...

and

Apollo Bay Apollo Bay is a coastal town in southwestern Victoria, Australia. It is situated on the eastern side of Cape Otway, along the edge of the Barham River and on the Great Ocean Road, in the Colac Otway Shire. The town had a population of 1,790 at ...

. With other early internet service providers it formed the Victorian Internet Exchange, an innovative network peering organisation, designed to put pressure on the cost of data. By 2009, Vicnet was recognised for its work in culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and its digital inclusion services provided for 62 community language groups.

Awards

* 1999 finalist for Skills.net program in the Global Bangemann Challenge * 2009 Australia and New Zealand Internet Best Practice Awards - Best Diversity Initiative

References

{{Reflist Internet-related organizations Defunct Internet service providers