Towards the 21st Century:
The National Library of Australia in a Digital Age
Introduction
I would like today to give you some understanding of how we in Australia are planning services to enter the age of mixed print and electronic media. I hope that you may be able to draw on some of our experience which may be useful also in the Japanese context.
The National Library of Australia
First, I must say a few words about Australia. Australia is a federal system, which means that the majority of powers of government rest not with the national government, but with state governments. Therefore our system of libraries is, as with many other federal countries, somewhat complex. Apart from the National Library of Australia itself, we have eight State and Territory libraries, all of which have major collecting roles in relation to their own States and are also the major libraries for the organisation of public library services at the local government level. The major libraries in size other than the National Library are those of our universities. Indeed the university libraries in total now spend about 20 times as much money on acquiring books as the National Library does, which gives you some idea of the National Library's size in relation to the whole system. Nevertheless, the National Library of Australia is by world standards a large medium national library. It is slightly smaller than the National Diet Library here in Japan, but not very much smaller, particularly if you will allow for the fact that the Diet Library here also serves the Diet itself. The National Library in Australia does not serve the Australian Parliament. There is a separate Australian Parliamentary Library. We are a library that comes within the portfolio of the Minister for Communications and the Arts and we are one of a number of national collecting institutions in that portfolio. These include institutions such as the National Film and Sound Archive (which was itself part of the National Library until 1985), the National Gallery, the National Museum, the National Maritime Museum and the Australian Archives. All of these institutions report to the Minister for Communications and the Arts. I think it is fairly rare in any country for the Arts responsibilities to be in the same portfolio working to the same Minister as for Communications. We have found it, that electronic developments are becoming so important, extremely useful to have these two responsibilities together in the same ministry, because it means that national policy development for both the content (in the Arts), and the carriage (through the communications systems), can be developed together in a much more coherent way. Although it was an accident of politics that brought these two areas together, it has worked extremely well to have these two sides of government policy making come together.
The National Library itself has been in existence from, in one form or another, soon after Australia became a country in 1901, when the States became a federation. It was not separately established from the Parliamentary Library until fairly recently, 1960, and its first purpose-built building which we now occupy and has been heavily remodelled since then, was opened in 1968 only. We are what is called in Australia a "statutory authority", that is, we have our own legislation (although the legal deposit legislation is part of a separate Copyright Act covering all aspects of copyright). Our legislation gives us three major functions. Firstly, we are required to develop a national collection including what is stated as being " a comprehensive collection relating to Australia and Australians", as you would expect. We are also required under our Act to maintain and provide access to the collections and obviously that requires us to undertake such actions as cataloguing, indexing and document supply. But we also have a third function, which is a wider function within the country, to lead and coordinate the whole national system of libraries so as to improve the access of Australians to information in general, so we have a coordination role. However, as I said at the beginning, because we are a federated country, we have no authority over institutions that report to State governments so that we can only lead by example and not by legal mandate.
Strategic Planning
The Library has for many years been involved in a fairly formal strategic planning process and our current strategic priorities are set out in our Strategic Plan. Those of you who have access to the Internet can access our planning documents such as this over the Internet on our World Wide Web site (http://www.nla.gov.au/). Our current strategic priorities, which were set three years ago, are these:
- to collect and to preserve Australian materials of national significance and to make those materials more known about and more used by people.
- to ensure that there is greater community and indeed government understanding of our role as an institution both as a cultural institution and an information institution.
- to maximise the access of Australians through the national system of libraries to obtain the materials and the information that they need for their own personal and for the nation's overall development.
As I have said, we have a fairly formal strategic planning process, and we review our directions formally about every three years, trying to look ahead about five years each time. We believe that it is becoming increasingly difficult to plan in detail more than about five years ahead. In fact, in our recent round of planning, which we commenced a few months ago towards our new strategic plan, we did in fact consider whether strategic planning is now out-of-date. Things are moving so quickly in the information services and the information technology areas that we have concluded that we need to be very much more clear as to where we are going, but also to be much more flexible in how we get there, because the technology which will enable us to realise our visions is changing so fast. So we see ourselves having clear goals to work towards but being very very flexible and indeed opportunistic in the methods we use. As part of our strategic planning this year we have done a major review of the factors in our environment that we believe will affect the National Library in the future. A National Library does not exist in isolation - it is an intrinsic part of the nation which it serves, and indeed increasingly a part of the world that it serves. We do not and cannot just set out our own priorities as a national library in isolation of the wishes, needs, priorities of the government, other libraries and other cultural institutions. So we have tried to look at some of the factors which we believe will be influencing our development heavily in the next few years.
First, as I have mentioned, the speed of change. This has led us to change our planning processes considerably since we last engaged in strategy development. It also has a significant effect on the problem of developing skills in our staff - so many new techniques and changes are coming along that we are finding we have to spend much more effort on training of staff and indeed, to some extent, the training of our users. It is also having, we believe, a significant effect on the rate at which we must make investment in capital works and equipment. Every year we are having to spend more money on equipment and associated technology, and once having invested of course, this causes further costs of maintaining and replacing that equipment in future years, which also has to be planned for.
A second issue is one that has been referred to in the literature and newspapers as "convergence". That is the difficulty of distinguishing unique roles for institutions which used to be clearly separate. For example, in our case we are finding more and more that we have overlapping responsibilities and interests with the Australian Archives, ie. the federal governments archives. We have to consider, when all objects can be changed into a digital electronic form, then what is it that distinguishes a library from a gallery, from a museum, if each of them are dealing simply with digital objects? We are also finding convergence in the whole publishing chain from the creator through to the library as a secondary distributor. When it is possible to create information yourself, to publish it and distribute it yourself over the Internet, what does this mean for the roles of institutions that have been previously involved in the publishing and distribution businesses? This includes libraries. More and more we are finding difficulties in relating to other institutions in that publishing chain, and we are also finding, with the increase in broadcasting, as in most countries, that the number of channels of broadcasting becomes greater and greater, and that the problems of capturing our visual and sound record of our society is becoming increasingly difficult for all our institutions.
Thirdly, there are a number of social effects affecting Australia at the moment. These may or may not be issues in Japan, but in Australia the issue of Australia's national identity separate from its countries of antecedent such as the United Kingdom is a major issue. The National Library is I think required to give greater weight to things that are specifically Australian in support of the promotion of a distinctly Australian identity and culture. This is perhaps not an issue for those of you from older cultures and older societies. Australia is now a very culturally diverse country. Immigration programs over half a century mean that we have many people from all over the world living in Australia and speaking different languages. This causes considerable difficulties in a national library in collecting materials which are in languages in which our own staff may not have expertise. The rapid rise of educational standards in our community means that the demand for research materials and research support from the National Library from our universities, from our colleges and now even from our schools is increasing rapidly and putting quite new demands on the National Library. And in Australia we have a strong commitment to what we call nationally social equity and justice, which requires us a national institution to give strong attention to the problems of enabling people who may be disadvantaged or disabled in some way to use the library services - people who may be blind or have physical disabilities or come from language backgrounds in which they find difficulty in using our services. And this requires our services to be much more diverse to meet the needs of these disadvantaged communities.
Fourthly, there are also a whole series of economic issues affecting our National Library planning. One is obvious in every country, the problem of globalisation. In our view, the days when a nation could decide its own destiny quite separate from the rest of the world have gone, and have probably gone forever. We live in a world which is increasingly interconnected, and policies and our own procedures within the National Library are increasingly being influenced by international developments and standards which have been developed elsewhere. If we are to communicate effectively with national libraries around the world, we also have to move in the same direction. We also believe the days when any national institution had a monopoly are also going very rapidly. We are seeing, certainly in Australia, increasing competition from other countries in areas in which our own services might have been regarded as the only available service only a few years ago. But we have also seen, as in business generally, the need to direct our services, not just to suit a vague group of the whole population, but to target our services more to particular client groups to meet their individual needs, as all organisations are having to do these days.
Fifthly there are political issues affecting us. Some of you may have noted that we had a change of government a week ago. After their having been many years out of government, it is very hard for us to predict what the new government may do in terms of policies. Like most national libraries, and I suspect my colleagues will also refer to this, we are operating increasingly under difficulties of having enough money to do what we want to do. We have now had a cut in our budget every year for eight years and yesterday our new government announced a large further cut in our public service. So when I get home I will have even more problems than when I left! We are also increasingly in the Library becoming involved in wider issues of government information management. Our government, perhaps belatedly, has discovered networking and the power of the electronic information sources. We are finding that the government's own wish to be efficient and to provide better services to the public is starting to require exactly the same kinds of technology and the kinds of skills that we have had in the Library. Thus some of us are getting larger roles within government in terms of advice and policy making for a wider area of government than the National Library has traditionally been involved in.
Finally there are the obvious changes of technology:
- User friendly software/workstations
- Low cost storage
- Low cost publishing
- Global networking
- Multimedia
I won't go through these in detail except to comment that it is our view that the costs of technology are going to continue to come down fast. For example, the issue that was raised this morning about the cost of networking is not one that we need to worry about. I believe that the costs of electronic storage and the cost of electronic networking are tending very rapidly towards zero for the kinds of purpose that libraries would wish to make of them. The fact that we may be being charged quite high prices by telecommunications companies is a separate issue - the charges are now usually very much higher than the actual costs. And that of course is an issue of communications policy in all countries. I am happy to say that our new government has announced that they are going to do something about costs, particularly of ISDN.
In our planning process we have asked ourselves a basic question, that is, if Australia did in fact have the world's best system for public access to information and to our documentary heritage, our culture, what would it look like in ten years time? We have then tried to answer that question, which is difficult. We have asked several other questions for our next plan. What should the library be in 2002? The significance is that I used the word 'what', not 'where'. That is what kind of institution does the National Library need to be in 2002 and beyond, which of course is exactly the problem that you have here with your planning of the Kansai-kan project. How will we get there from here? There is an old Irish joke that says "if I wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here". And it is true that our starting point has to be where we are, not where we would ideally like to be. The difficulties of development in our institution are often those of the skills and attitudes of our staff, although I believe we have in many ways a very good staff. The rate of change is now so great, and developing all the skills that are required as well as retaining the old skills that are so much needed in the print world, and the understanding scholarship that so many older librarians have had, is a major problem. How do we retain both in a new system which mixes both print and electronics? We are finding increasingly that we have to change the organisation, almost every month it seems sometimes. We are finding that it is no longer possible to have an organisation which stays the same for very long. And the last problem, of course, like all libraries or national libraries I suspect, we never have even near the amount of resources that we need to do the job that we would like to do.
When you look around the world you find that there are very few things in common amongst national libraries. They have in total a very large number of functions and services but if you try to draw out which ones are absolutely crucial, which are done in every national library of the world, there are very few. In fact, in a study that I was involved in two or three years ago, the only common things that we could find in national libraries were that they were mostly funded through taxpayers money through the government, that they were open to the public, and they acted as the major archive of printed materials produced within the country. There were no other common features amongst all the national libraries. The significance of that is that each national library is indeed different and is affected by its national history. And increasingly if resources are limited, each national library must deliberately choose which functions it wishes to carry out as priorities in the future. No single national library will be able to carry out all the functions that might be carried out by a national library. And choosing, in my experience, is difficult for management and within the political process. We believe that in Australia, and this may not be true in all countries, that the key role of a national library is the preservation of the nation's culture. That is, its ability to collect in some form or another, the essence of our society so that we can tell the people in our country in 100 or 200 years time "what was it like in 1996". How do we capture that, how do we organise it, how do we preserve it for the long term? In general, no other institution does that in our society for the whole nation.
We have therefore started to review our strategic directions and believe that for us one important strategy is to associate ourselves with the moves to strengthen national culture and identity in Australia, and to make ourselves increasingly visible all around our country, either through services being delivered around the country, by exhibitions of material and increasingly, of course, through electronic networks to be able to deliver to the whole of our country. Something that I should have explained earlier was that the National Library is in the national capital Canberra, which in fact is a very small place. Canberra has only 300,000 people, so it has always been true that most of the potential users of our services have been a long distance from the Library itself. So we have always regarded services outside the building as being more important than inside the building. We have to take services to people, not expect them to come to us.
Our planning is based on an assumption that the system we are trying to achieve can only be achieved by collaboration with other libraries and similar institutions around our country. And we believe that we can provide a useful role for our country in terms of relating to international activities - both directly in providing services to other countries, but also acting to liaise with and to gain the benefits of working with other countries in a variety of ways.
I don't want to go into too much detail on this. What we have been trying to do is to map out the activities that we need to undertake in the next five years to pursue some of our objectives. One of them has already been mentioned, the problem of legal deposit for new materials, multi- media materials and electronic materials which is a significant problem in every country. We believe that we have to be much more active in collecting. We can no longer be passive and wait for people to give us material. I have already mentioned the problem of a multicultural diverse community and working with many different languages, but also electronic information obviously does not automatically come to us. In order to undertake this role we are working more and more closely with other libraries and archives in areas such as collecting and metadata standards. In some cases we have concluded formal agreements with other collecting institutions for particular areas of collecting.
Another area of development is promotion and education. Traditionally the Library's activities have been limited largely to its own building, through the holding of seminars and presentation of exhibitions. But with the development of electronic techniques we are now able to develop virtual exhibitions and to make greater use of the repackaging of materials which have been digitised or which are available in electronic form for educational purposes, including course materials and other publications. However, we also make much greater use of travelling exhibitions which promote the Library more widely throughout the country.
A further area of development is services to the disabled. There are problems and opportunities presented by the electronic media for disabled people and we try hard to be up-to-date in our understanding and use of new technologies to improve access for the disabled.
Finally, we have been trying to make a greater nationally coordinated effort in the areas of retention of final copies and preservation of important materials throughout the country. Unfortunately our successes in this have been relatively small so far.
A second set of strategies are in relation to the Library support for national economic advance. Primarily this consists of support for research activities through a variety of services. These have been built around the concept of the "distributed national collection", which is defined as :
The aggregation of all collections in Australia which are recorded in generally accessible databases and are accessible, either in person or by inter-library document supply, to users with bona fide reasons for access. The distributed national collection is comprehensive in relation to Australiana and selective in relation to the rest of the world as present and future needs of Australia require.
To support this concept we have an Office of the Distributed National Collection within the National Library, which concentrates on collecting agreements and the use of the conspectus tool developed by the Research Libraries Group in the United States to enable some standard means of comparing strengths of collections. Other Library activities are designed to improve directory and referral services, the networking of bibliographic data and support for document supply through a national document location system and gateways to document suppliers in other countries.
The National Library of Australia has been involved in networking since the 1970's and its current Australian Bibliographic Network system provides services to over 1,500 libraries with a database of more than 12 million records. It is currently developing with the National Library of New Zealand a completely re-engineered set of services to be known as World 1 and consisting of a "one-stop shop" service to documents on a world-wide basis. The system will be capable of dealing with all forms of information - print, multimedia and electronic, it will be user-friendly and powerful, and it will build on international standards to enable it to link up with and fit into similar developments in other countries.
But such a system is limited unless it is backed up by easy sources for documents. The National Library of Australia has for some time now been engaged in a relatively small-scale program of digitisation of some of its important materials so that they may be made available directly over the network. Last December the Australian Government announced the development of a new program known as "Australia's Story" in which funds are being provided to several national collecting institutions to collaborate in a major project of digitisation of Australia's most important cultural materials.
A further important development is the Library's World Wide Web Information Server which already provides a large number of services, including Internet access, to the Library's catalogues, including links to all Australian electronic journals and all known sources of Australian Government Internet-based information. The Library has found this Server to be extremely useful in the development of new policies and in advertising new services to its customers. It has engaged in a number of experiments to improve the retrieval of its services through the Server.
Finally, the Library has been re-organising its international services so that these may be built more firmly on top of national developments. It has reduced much of its collecting from other countries and is re-directing effort to improved electronic access. This also requires a greater involvement of staff in international activities through conferences, projects and standards development and we look forward to working more closely with the National Diet Library and the other libraries represented at this seminar.
A major challenge for all our national libraries is to provide a more integrated access to both print and electronic services and we hope to see much more international collaboration in research and development in this area through document delivery projects and the developments of appropriate standard means through which we can interconnect our networks.
The major challenges that we see at present for the Library are :
- How we can integrate effectively access for users throughout the country to print, multimedia and electronic materials.
- How we can provide long-term access and preservation of electronic materials.
- How we can maintain libraries and in particular the national library as a shared public good, when it will become so easy to charge by use for electronic materials.
- And finally, how we can reconstruct our relationships with other libraries and organisations in an electronic world in which no organisation has a natural monopoly of service.
Coming to the Kansai-kan project, clearly this is very exciting and Kansai-kan will be a very large and important building and service in the Kansai region. If I may be so bold as to offer any advice after such a short time in Japan, I think there is some danger in the early stages of such a project in concentrating on the physical structure of the building. Certainly, any national library should be an icon and symbol of its country and of architectural excellence, but I believe that a national library's success in the future will be dependent on its ability to :
- Work in collaboration with other libraries nationally and internationally.
- Work in partnerships with other government organisations and the business sector to deliver a greater range of services remotely based on its collections.
- Having highly skilled staff who have a feeling and understanding for the cultural needs of the nation, but also the technological skills, entrepreneurial and marketing skills and who are capable of working collaboratively.
We cannot now assume that national libraries will automatically continue to be supported - their place in the nation will have to be earned through their continuing success in providing services to their people. The national library in the future is in the end not a building, nor even a service, but a responsibility to the nation, and as an example for preservation of cultural diversity for the world as a whole.
I leave you with a final thought. In all this opportunity provided by electronic technologies, let us remember the brilliant technology of the book itself - portable, random access, easily used, and often a thing of beauty in its own right. As we sometimes say :
Books are trees made immortal.
I am sure that the future National Library of Japan will remain one of the places where that immortality is defended, and we hope to work with you in the future on achieving this.