Fran Wilson, Director, Resource Sharing Services, National Library of Australia, Linda Luther, University Librarian, Professor Michael Bennett, Head, School of History and Classics and Tony Boston, Assistant Director General, Resource Sharing Services, National Library of Australia at the Tasmanian launch of Libraries Australia. (photograph: courtesy of the Advocate). Media Release [PDF]

Libraries Australia Tasmanian Launch,
University of Tasmania, Cradle Coast campus,
Thursday 7 Sept, 2006.

by
Professor Michael Bennett,
School of History & Classics, University of Tasmania

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen….

‘How bright a household is the family of books! … In their company there is no noise, no greed, no self-will: at a word they speak to you, at a word they are still; to all our requests their response is ever ready and to the point. Books indeed are a higher — a wider, more tenacious — memory, a storehouse which is the common property of us all.’ Thus wrote the humanist educator, Pietro Paulo Vergerio around 1400. In his world, the early Renaissance, books were scarce indeed. Some fifty years later Johann Gutenberg inaugurated the typographical revolution, and in the next fifty years Europe produced more books than had been produced in the previous millennium. The historian John Man pointed to another crucial difference between the world of the scribe and the world of print: ‘A copied book just sits there waiting for readers, one by one; a successful printed book is a stone dropped in water, its message rippling outwards to hundreds, thousands, millions.’

Nonetheless there were limits to the outward ripples. Books came to Australia with the first colonists, but for many people they must have seemed as hard to come by as manuscript books in the Middle Ages. The tyranny of distance limited access to the full range of knowledge and to new ideas. By the 1830s Tasmania had a number of circulating and subscription libraries, but the fare was limited. An especially enterprising library was established at Evandale. The borrowing records are still extant, and, as Keith Adkins’ study has shown, when plotted on a time-line they show spikes in borrowing that correlate not, as one might expect, with the seasons but with the arrival in Launceston of new shipments of books.

The early promise of libraries in Tasmania was not sustained. The Gold Rush in Victoria which made possible the great state library in Melbourne necessarily led to population loss and the cultural impoverishment of Tasmania. The journals of William Moore Ferrar, an immigrant who farmed in the Midlands from the 1840s to the 1890s, provide a fascinating insight into cultural life at this time. By day he worked tirelessly on his farm at Plassey near Ross, and in the evening he turned to his books and journal. He wrote two novels, the Maxwells of Bremgarten and Artabanzanus along with countless poems and letters to the newspaper. Above all, he read and read. His books were often borrowed from his neighbours in the Midlands. In March 1863 he was reading Livingston’s Travels lent him by George Clark. On 25 April he read the 1 st vol. of Prescott’s History of Ferdinand and Isabella, lent by Joseph Bayles. On the 29 th he borrowed a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 7 th edition from Robert Gatenby. Presumably he borrowed the volume containing entries beginning with ‘N’. He records reading that night the lives of Nelson, Necker, Newton and Niebuhr. A red letter day for him was 10 March 1868 when he was guest at Vaucluse, the house of Joseph Bayles at Conara. He rowed a boat on the South Esk, Mrs Bayles played a harmonium. Above all, he was allowed into Bayles’ library with, as he reported several thousand volumes.

During the twentieth century library provision became a concern of government, and library services extended considerably. Few of us will have felt, as Ferrar may have felt, beholden to richer neighbours for access to information. The great age of the old-style public library, in which people came together to read newspapers, borrow books and meet boyfriends or girlfriends, is perhaps now over, though I hope not. The internet is making possible la bibliotheque sans frontières, and librarians are becoming tour guides to this digital universe. The potential of this new world are enormous for Australia, with its widely dispersed population, and for Tasmania. Indeed the benefits are increasingly evident, when one considers the massively increased access that students on the Cradle Coast Campus have had to information sources in a few short years. The campus is now the home of the international British Enlightenment Research Network.

We don’t hear enough nowadays of the need for Australia to be a smart nation, but the nation’s economic competitiveness and cultural well-being depend on networking, communication, pooling of resources, and building capacity across this vast island continent. The role of librarians is crucial. They have responded energetically and imaginatively to the unprecedented challenges. There has been a long and successful history of collaboration between Australian libraries. Librarians working in national, public, academic, government, corporate and school libraries can be justifiably proud of their success in delivering access to information to all Australians, and in connecting their users to the information they need through a range of services, such as interlibrary loan, digitisation and search services. They even offer advice to users on line and in real time!

Libraries Australia is the latest stage in this endeavour. It provides a single gateway to a catalogue of over 40 million books, journals, newspapers, pictures, maps and more, located in over 800 Australian libraries. The service also contains information on all books published in Australia, written by Australians or about Australia.

The creation and development of Libraries Australia, has been made possible by the vision, commitment and financial support of Australian libraries. The project has been part of the working lives of Australian library staff for many years, and is a monument to their vision, enthusiasm, dedication and hard work.

I congratulate Jan Fullerton and the staff at the National Library for this remarkable search service. I declare the Libraries Australia service to be launched in Tasmania.

Media Release [PDF]