AS7637 SLVTSD-AS-AP State Library Of Victoria

SLVTSD-AS-AP is State Library Victoria, the state library of Victoria at 328 Swanston Street, Melbourne. AS7637 is its autonomous system, and it is one of the more unusual institutional ASNs in the Australian registry.

What it's used for

• The library's own network, and the address space it inherited from Vicnet. Its APNIC records still carry the line that Vicnet is "a government funded ISP providing access for libraries, community organisations and individuals".
• Roughly 9,700 IPv4 addresses across six prefixes, the largest being 202.137.64.0/19. Every one of them is registered STATELIBVIC-AU to the library itself.
• Transit comes from AARNet, Australia's academic and research network, and a commercial carrier. Sitting behind AARNet is the tell of a public research and cultural institution rather than a commercial network.

Notable

• This is institutional address space belonging to a state cultural body. It is not a consumer ISP and it has no subscriber pools, so an address here should be read as a library or government system, not a home user.
• The Vicnet framing in the registry is a historical artefact. Vicnet ran as a business unit of the library from 1994 and was closed in 2014; the AS and the address space stayed with the library.

Interesting

• Vicnet was one of the earliest public-access internet services in Australia, and it is the reason a library holds an AS number and a /19 at all. Very few libraries anywhere ended up as their own ISP.