Peter Cochrane
The Research Adventure
The relationship between
researchers and research libraries is a rather neglected topic, but we
are trying to address that in the centennial volume that I am editing for the
National Library.
I want this volume to be
more than a "Treasures of …" volume, and it is this ‘more’ that I
want to talk about today.
How does a library become
a great research library? How are collections built? What mix of policy and
serendipity is in this? What part have historians and other scholars, the ‘users’,
played, in building the collections their descendants now use; in laying
the foundations of the research adventure?
With these sorts of questions
I’ve encouraged authors contributing to the volume, to say something about the
‘inside story’ of the Library; to research and write its ‘collecting history’.
If the most important thing to us is the collections and that is still very
much the case, despite the onward march of digitisationthen the Library’s
history is the sum total of its acquisition narratives, i.e. the
stories of how things were got and why? That is the history we have embarked
on.
For some of us the Library’s
own registry files have become the key to this research adventure. To
craft these acquisition narratives, we research the research institution. The
registry files are a resource of immense richness. They reveal a web of conversations
linking benefactors, historians and other scholars, novelists, poets, politicians,
bureaucrats and the acquisitorsthe Librarians.
The correspondence files
are the skeletal remains of the collections’ beginnings. And our work is a kind
of ‘archaeology’ of the origins of the research adventure in this institution.
The NLA, in this sense, has
been conversing with the nation, and the wider world, about the ‘research adventure’,
for about fifty years, ‘fifty’ because it was around the middle of the century,
let’s say post-war, that both the History discipline and the collecting
business became truly professionalised, adequately funded for rapid expansion,
and comprehensive in ambition and scope.
Harold White became National
Librarian in 1947. He was entrepreneurial, visionary and relentless in his ascquisition
policy and he had a very talented team of co-acquisitors who achieved research
depth across many fields in a very short space of time. They laid a foundation
for researchers which the Library continues to build upon. Post-war Australia
was not exactly flush with funds but White and his team recognised this urgency
and convinced government. These days, the NLA has to work in different and more
straitened circumstances to convince higher powers of research and collection
priorities.
In the 1950s an order from
the National Library at Grahame Book Co. in Sydney was dubbed a ‘cream cake day’.
When the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, was asked to authorise the purchase
of the Nichol Smith literature collection (purchased,1961) he wrote in the margin:
‘Eighteenth century. How could I refuse!’ This was one of many purchases in
excess of the budget in that period.
The shape of the Library’s
collections in the formative, post-war years was determined by a mix of purposeful
collecting policy and the elements of fortune by political decisions and tax
law, by peaceful and cooperative compromise between institutions as well as
bitter demarkation disputes, and by familiar human elements like ambition, persistence,
intuition, sheer luck, and of course great commitment by the acquisition librarians,
the frontline of the collecting business.
I do mean ‘front-line’ because
the registry files make you very much aware of how the Library does not end
at its outer walls. The ethereal conversations in the acquisition records are
merely the remnants of the explorations, the ventures, travels, and the peaceful,
negotiated appropriations that have made our work as historians and writers
possible. ‘Front-line’ reminds us that librarians had to go over-the-top to
build the research adventure.
There are many stories.
Here is one: when Graeme Powell sought the papers of the Building Worker’s leader,
Bob Pringle, he was taken on a pub crawl in inner Sydney with the promise of
the papers always at the next pub. Bob would down pints, then bang the bar with
his fist and shout ‘When y’er ready’ to the barman. I like to think of Graeme,
standing beside Pringle in strange surroundings, thinking ‘Now what is best
from a collection-building point of view, should I go with him or stick to lemonade?’
The acquisition librarians have not, so far as I know, sacrificed their bodies
to the cause, but they have gone the extra mile on many an occasion, and possibly
the extra pint. The Pringle Papers can now be read in the Manuscripts Reading Room.
There is another story about a budgie, but Graeme won’t allow me to tell you
that one.
The wooing or stalking of
potential donors and collectors great and small was sometimes a simple matter.
Conscious of the tyranny of distance, Nichol Smith wanted this National Library,
on the other side of the world, to have his collection. Leon Kashnor,
also in England, wanted his collection to come here in preference to the Biblioteca
Sentrinelli in Milan which offered more money. He wanted his books to have a
British home and he also liked Cliff Burmester, the Library’s Liaison Officer
in London. All kinds of weird and wonderful affinities are part of the story.
Kashnor thought Burmester looked like Bradman. They talked as much about cricket
as books.
But acquisition was frequently
more intricate and perplexing. Librarians in the field soon learnt that relinquishing
private papers or manuscripts or books was an emotional business. They were
dealing with passionate obsessionsthe records of a life, rare books, rare
things, accumulations of love and dedication. They encountered financial worries,
sizeable egos and furtive plans for posterity. Success depended on collecting
acumen based on extensive knowledge but also on persuasive skills that lay somewhere
between diplomacy and courtship, and on being supportive in surprising ways.
Harold White organised a Commonwealth annuity for Daisy Bates to continue her
work; Pauline Fanning, whose contribution to the Library was, in so many ways,
great, bought office furniture, notably filing cabinets, for the very old Nettie
Palmer.
The purchase of the formed
collections, like Nichol Smith, enabled the Library to acquire what was often
a lifetime’s collecting work in one fell swoop. Well-read librarians, bibliographic
wonders, then set about deepening or extending that field of research with the
acquisition of books and pamphlets, serials, newspapers, vast quantities of
microcopy and so on. ‘Creative gap filling’ it was called. As we know this was
the fast-tracking of the collection building process, of producing a world class
research institution in a very short space of time.
Acquiring the formed collections
gave depth in numerous areas. But the Library was also responsive to changing
patterns of scholarship and the collecting net was notably broadened and less
elitist from the mid-1960s onwards, with a progressive shift to include extra-parliamentary
politics of Left and Right, labour history, feminist history, popular culture,
multiculturalism, environmental history, land rights etc.
Whether an acquisition is
someone’s library or a mass of private papers, the process is still the samethe transformation of the energies of the individual collector into an enduring
public resource. Research libraries make public and accessible a host of private
or previously inaccessible pasts. They turn family matters into national heritage…etc.
They are a hedge against forgetting; they are guarantors defying oblivion. Which
is why libraries are so precious and powerful. Some people may take this belief
too farthere was a character in Melbourne who donated his papers to the State
Library of Victoria so they would be safe when the end of the world came. Other
people have made that preciousness their one concession to humanity: there was
a colonel in Sherman’s army during the American Civil War who burnt everything
in his path on the march to Atlanta, except the libraries.
The conversations that I’ve
called the ‘acquisition narratives’ reveal the bibliographical wisdom and the
scholarship of acquisition librarians. The records of research inquiries reveal
how they routinely point our projects and ideas in new and lateral directions,
and we know that of course from personal experience. That wonderful half sentence:
‘Have you looked at…’.
Equally, historians have
played a part in building the research adventure, not merely as ‘users’ of the
collections, but as advisers, collectors in their own right, and often as mediators
between the institution and ‘uncaptured’ papers or private libraries.
When the Library was pursuing
Leon Kashnor’s magnificent collection of books, pamphlets and manuscripts in
British political economy (13 000 items covering the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), John
La Nauze, professor of History at Melbourne University, was asked to formally
report on the quality of the collection. He said it was a collection that all
of Australia’s libraries together could not duplicate. He also said the following:
‘Australia has a history before 1788. It is the history of Great Britain.’ Not
untrue but not quite the full story either.
What La Nauze wanted to
tell the Library, in 1951, was that the Kashnor collection would allow historians
in this country to shrug off their obsession with the act of colonisation and
look at the background which led to it. Historians did just that. But since
then the Kashnor collection has been used by many scholars for many other purposes.
It has been used for studies in the history of health and population, radicalism, chartism in particular, religion and free thought. It has been the principle
source for a biography of the radical engraver, William Linton, and for a major
study of the early Victorians. The continuing contemporary power of these collections
is one of the mysteries and blessings of a great research library.
I am addressing this point
because our brief asks us to discuss particular books that have relied heavily
on the collections. That is easy. There is a bigger point here: the regenerative,
chameleon-like powers of particular collections, to be many things to many people,
to serve books and scholars not just of one time, nor just one field, but of
many times and many fields.
Nowhere is that more clear
than in the case of the Nan Kivell collection: that collection was formed more
than half a century ago. It was distinguished by Nan Kivell’s curiosity and inclusiveness.
Nan Kivell was unsystematic,
eclectic and non-elitist in his collecting. Bernard Smith recognised this collection
as vital to his study of European visual culture in the Pacific. Smith established
a field but by no means exhausted it. Yet today, decades later, the Nan Kivell collection
is ‘fortuitously congruent’ (Nic Thomas’s phrase) with the concerns of cross-cultural
historythe process of rethinking and revising European visions over time,
the engagement with ‘popular and ephemeral materials’ as well as the canonical,
the concern with literary culture but also with things ‘visual, material and
spatial’.
A similar argument could
be made for the Williams collection in the Asian Section of the Library, about
its relevance to ‘Orientalist’ concerns of students today.
None of this means that
the Library’s collecting is any less urgent than it was fifty years ago. New
problems now confront the collection builders, not least of which is funding.
‘Fortuitous congruence’ is good news, but it may not always apply. We don’t
know, I don’t know, how many visiting scholars ’users’ are absolutely stymied
by the lack of sources here. The sources sought by social and cultural historians
now are far broader than that which political historians wanted 30 or 40 years
ago? Does Manuscripts meet their need for material on the built environment
or popular songs or gardens?
The Librarians, too, the
heroes of the story, are under new pressures. I wonder if acquisition librarians
have anything like the freedom they used to have to act on their initiative
in ‘filling out’ or ‘deepening’ the collections. The future of their vocation
depends on the future of the humanities, of a reading culture and of the love
of history, on decision-making processes from which we are perhaps more disenfranchised
than ever.
It also depends on just
how the virtual library and the training required to run it will mesh with the
continuing demands for collection and bibliographic expertise, on whether the
necessary effort going into software and its management can mesh with a humanities
education and a true reading culture, on whether librarians can continue to
be great bibliographers, our confidants and advisers in the digital age.
For libraries digitistion
is a scintillating response to an otherwise impossible problem. Already we can
see how it will extend the research adventure for us all, how it will provide
us with undreamt of mobility while sitting in the same place, visiting digitised
collections anywhere in the world, or offering up our own collections to people
far away. But as with any technological revolution, the costs and benefits are
reshuffled and redistributed and we have to be watchful and ready to save valuable
affinities that might, unnecessarily, be lost.
One of these is the affinity
which has been the subject of my talk. The affinity between historians and writers
and the keepers of the collections in great public institutions such as the
National Library, and in turn, their affinity with those collections. It’s an
affinity which is expressed in the anticipation we feel every time we, the historians,
the writers, walk up the Library’s front steps.
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