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37th Annual Report 1996-97
Collections and Services to the Community

Objectives

  • To collect, organise, promote and utilise documentary materials which are of national significance in providing an understanding of Australia and Australians.
  • To provide efficient, timely information services from the Library’s collections and, through referral to other national and international services, to meet the needs of Australians engaged in the formulation and transmission of knowledge, particularly in research, policy development, authorship and creative endeavour.

This section of the Library’s annual report describes activities relating to our collections: the development, management and promotion of our Australian and overseas collections and the wide range of services delivered from those collections. The year provided many challenges to the staff acquiring, cataloguing and managing collections, and providing services from those collections, at a time of budget reductions but continuing growth in print and electronic Australian publishing. The Library is making increasing use of technology to operate more efficiently and to fulfil our objective of providing efficient, timely information services.

Australian collecting

The Library acquired a range of Australian materials in the year under review, both in published form and in special formats, such as manuscripts, documentary pictures and photographs, and oral history. Print materials were acquired largely through legal deposit requirements under the Copyright Act 1968 for current publications, and purchase of older publications not previously obtained. National Library staff actively contacted Commonwealth Government agencies over their legal deposit obligations, and made visits to government offices and agencies in capital cities and regional centres. We worked to improve the collecting of materials published by a wide range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations which, for a range of reasons, are not readily acquired under legal deposit arrangements.

The Library developed policy and procedures for the identification, selection and cataloguing of Australian online publications, work that was later developed into the policy paper on electronic access, described in the chapter ‘National leadership and coordination’. Australian electronic materials form a rapidly growing part of our Australian collections.

In the Australian special materials areas, routine collecting continued with many successes as the Library worked to fulfil its obligations to acquire materials that record and document aspects of Australian life and achievement. We initiated a number of special collecting projects to fill gaps in the collections. These include the Law in Australian Society project aimed at collecting photographs and papers of lawyers of national standing, as well as interviewing them for the Oral History program; the Australians of the Year oral history project; and the scientists and children’s writers manuscript project. Staff completed a project to photograph aspects of Canberra life, as well as one to record aspects of Australian life such as leisure, education, transport and religion.

Notable acquisitions for the year include:

  • the papers of Lady Casey (wife of R.G. Casey), a noted writer and biographer;
  • papers of the scientists A.J. (Jock) Marshall, Isobel Bennett and Timothy Murrell;
  • papers of the lawyer Ian Temby QC;
  • papers of the writers Alan Seymour, Russell Braddon and Helen Garner;
  • papers of the politician, diplomat and aviator Sir Thomas White;
  • manuscripts of Christine Macpherson relating to the original composition of the song ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

Pictorial acquisitions included a fine collection of vintage prints by the Australian photographer Olive Cotton; a number of portraits, including the singer Florence Austral and the painters Judy Cassab (a self-portrait), Douglas Dundas and Lloyd Rees, portrait busts of the scientist Sir Gustav Nossal and the writer and Nobel Laureate Patrick White, and a wide range of photographs.

A number of important map acquisitions were made, including three eighteenth-century maps of the world, and a map by Sidney Hall (c.1835) of Van Diemen’s Land.

Overseas collecting

The Library continued the development of its overseas collections, with just under 20,000 monograph titles added to the collection—the same as the previous year—and over 32,000 current serial titles held—a slight drop. In order to better inform the public about new additions to the overseas collections, the Library began to issue a regular list of new titles acquired by the Library. The list is available on the Library’s server.

The Library continued to develop institution-to-institution links in support of cooperative overseas collecting for Asian library materials. Library staff further developed cooperative collection and access agreements for Asian language materials with the Australian National University Library. A formal agreement was signed for Korean materials, and substantial progress made on agreements for Thai and some Chinese materials.

The Library’s Regional Officer in Indonesia, Ms Amelia McKenzie, was succeeded by Mr Oliver Mann in December 1996. During her period in Indonesia, Ms McKenzie made a significant impact on the efficient operation of the Indonesian Acquisition Program by automating acquisition procedures and expanding sources of supply of material. Four Australian university libraries and the National Library of Singapore are now partners in the program.

Film and Video Lending Service

The Library’s Film and Video Lending Service has been showing a consistent decline in usage for some years, compared to the increasing cost of maintaining the service. Pressures on the Library’s budget led to a careful evaluation of the service during the year. The collection comprises nearly 15,000 international titles in general education and film studies categories (the Australian film collection having been transferred to the National Film and Sound Archive in 1984). As the Library has focused its strategic priorities on collecting Australian materials in recent years, it became increasingly clear that the Film and Video Lending Service did not support these priorities, and the declining use of the service was of concern. Nevertheless, in seeking a solution to the future of the service, the Library was mindful of the needs of the current users, and of the valuable cultural resource represented by the collection.

During 1996, the Library opened negotiations with a range of organisations which have a core commitment to film as a medium, with a view to outsourcing the film lending service. At the same time, we held user consultations through public meetings and by mail. In May, the Library announced the signing of an outsourcing agreement with Cinemedia (a Victorian government body formed by the merger of the State Film Centre and Film Victoria). Under the agreement, the Library will retain ownership of the collections, and overall policy control over the service. For an annual fee, Cinemedia will manage the collection and provide a lending service from Melbourne. The key features of the new arrangement are that the cost of the service to users will stay the same, and Cinemedia must meet performance standards specified by the Library. These include further development of the films collection, for which Cinemedia will employ additional staff. An independent advisory panel has been established to maximise user involvement.

The Film and Video Collection was transferred to Cinemedia’s premises in Melbourne in June. The Library will review the operation of the contract in December 1997.

Transfer of the Australian ISBN Agency

In late May, the Library concluded an agreement with D.W.Thorpe, the Melbourne-based publisher, to transfer the administration of the Australian ISBN Agency from the Library to Thorpe. The Library established the Australian ISBN Agency in 1968 to provide International Standard Book Numbers to Australian publishers, and the Agency has played a significant role in encouraging and fostering the widespread acceptance and use of ISBN in Australia. However, as a service directed primarily at publishers and authors, it is appropriate that the book trade in Australia eventually assume responsibility for the operation of ISBN, as is already the case in the United States and the United Kingdom. Under the terms of the agreement, D.W.Thorpe will continue to supply ISBN at no charge to all Australian publishers, will supply the related bibliographic information to the Library, and will fulfil all the obligations of the national ISBN Agency as required by the International ISBN Agency.

The Library will not make a financial contribution to Thorpe for the operation of the service, nor will it receive one. The Library will continue to issue International Standard Serial Numbers under a long-standing agreement with UNESCO’s International Serials Data System.

Collection management and access

Collection management and access would not be possible without efficient and effective technical services to select, acquire and catalogue materials for the collections. All of these processes have made extensive use of technology for many years, so that our staff are highly skilled in making efficient use of computer systems. It was therefore a logical step to use the latest digitisation and Internet technologies to improve our collection management and access processes, and some of these initiatives are described below. At the same time, the Library developed its use of Internet technology to create new services and to offer previously unthought-of levels of remote access to its collections.

The Library continued to seek greater efficiencies in the creation of catalogue records, and to make items available for use more quickly. During the year, we reorganised work teams and changed workflows to streamline the handling of material. Online cataloguing tools were introduced for those cataloguers working on personal computers, and a Technical Services World Wide Web home page, with links to other resources, was created. Following an upgrade of the Library’s Integrated Library Management System (ILMS), staff added serial order information to the acquisitions module, while the International Standard Serial Number database was also incorporated into the local system, greatly improving access to it.

Bibliographic control of the Library’s print collections made steady progress. As well as cataloguing all incoming material, cataloguers created records for a number of collections of older material. All Tasmanian maps held by the Library are now catalogued, and the cataloguing of South Australian maps is under way. Other cataloguing projects completed during the year include a collection of Australian songs, 1920–39; all Australian imprints of piano music and vocal music; and oral history recordings from the Australian response to the AIDS project and the Women of the Land project. We also completed full cataloguing of a large collection of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Australian pamphlets.

As well as cataloguing print materials, the Library began development of a completely new model for the management of and access to Australian electronic publications—the PANDORA project, described in the chapter ‘National leadership and coordination’.

Staff continued work on a project to document and describe the Library’s holdings of unique material relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We have also completed development work on the publication in electronic form of a guide to the Library’s holdings of manuscript, pictorial and oral history materials relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

The Library extended access to the collections through the introduction of a World Wide Web interface to the catalogue, allowing users, regardless of their physical location, to use hypertext links from catalogue records to the associated digital image or electronic journal.

In June 1996, the Library launched the Images 1 database of digital reproductions of pictorial items in the Library’s collections. Images 1 provides remote access through the Library’s Internet information server to electronic copies of many of the Library’s most important pictorial materials. At its launch, the database included 13,500 digital images of watercolours, paintings, drawings, prints and photographs representing a broad range of historical subjects. Library staff digitised a further 1400 images to be added to the database during the year. It is estimated that approximately 1500 uses are made of the database each day by remote and on-site users.

The Library’s Internet information server is now a significant source of information about the Library, its collections, services and policies. In addition to those services described above, we have mounted on the server:

  • fully indexed manuscript finding aids
  • guides to the Library’s collections
  • a list of National Library of Australia publications and products, with illustrations of the items and instructions on how to order online
  • lists of new additions to the collections
  • a ‘What’s On’ section
  • online versions of exhibitions
  • a range of policy and administrative documents, including the annual report.

The Library also hosts the Commonwealth Government Internet entry point, a collection of links to Australian government information at all levels. Users throughout Australia and internationally have responded enthusiastically to the server as a fast and accessible gateway to the Library. During the year, the number of Library files transmitted daily almost doubled, from an average of 7629 daily in 1995–96 to 15,183 daily in 1996–97: a total of over 5.5 million for the current year. We estimate that approximately 25% of these requests are from overseas. The Library allocated additional staff to the development and maintenance of the server, with a key task being the reorganisation of the information structure to facilitate browsing.

The increasing use of these and other electronic resources, such as the Library’s extensive CD-ROM network, led to some decline in items requested from the collections by on-site users. However, information requests answered by reference staff in all Reading Rooms (including telephone enquiries) rose slightly over the previous year, indicating no reduction in demand. Recognising users’ need for assistance with new information technology, the Library issued lists of significant Australian electronic resources available on the Internet, and trained regular Library users in navigation of the Internet.

The Library finalised its policy on the provision of access for users to information in other electronic forms such as networked databases and commercial services. This policy complements the Library’s revised Collection Development Policy for overseas material, and outlines the Library’s approach to the provision of access to information that will no longer be collected in traditional print formats.

Preservation of collections

As part of its responsibilities to develop and maintain a national collection of Australian materials in a range of formats, the Library faces significant challenges in preserving its collections both to enable their use by current researchers and to ensure their survival for future generations. With rapid developments in information technology, and with strong growth in electronic publishing, the Library is facing a number of specific challenges as well as opportunities. In a variety of ways, technological issues dominated the year for the Library’s Preservation staff. At the same time, these staff members continued to face heavy responsibilities for the vast bulk of the collections which exist in traditional print and paper-based formats.

The National Library continued to work as a partner in the Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project (ACDP), 1840–45, funded by the Australian Research Council to convert to digital format a selected number of rare nineteenth-century Australian serial publications and novels. While this project will have a specific practical outcome, it also offers a valuable opportunity for the Library to understand the range of problems involved in the digitisation of fragile nineteenth-century paper-based materials.

With its extensive oral history collections, the Library has developed a major interest in programs to ensure the long-term preservation of a sensitive and vulnerable form of technology. We are investing considerable effort to transfer identified high-priority parts of the Oral History Collection from analogue to digital form.

The Library embarked on the first stage of a five-year storage strategy designed to ensure appropriate storage conditions for all of its collections: a key preventive preservation strategy. Following advertising for tenders, the Library offered a contract to Decoin Pty Ltd for the construction of a purpose-built storage facility to house off-site a large part of the Library’s important overseas collections and to enable the consolidation in the main National Library building of the core Australiana collections.

Preservation staff developed new preventive preservation strategies, summarised in the newly issued Collection Disaster Plan, and strengthened existing programs of staff and user education. The Library took part in an internship program, partly funded by the National Conservation Program of the Heritage Collections Committee of the Cultural Ministers Council with matching Library funding. The six-month internship is designed to focus on the preservation needs of collections held by the Library relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Exhibition Program

The Library sees an active exhibition program as integral to providing wide public access to collections. Exhibitions are also powerful tools for promoting awareness and support for the Library’s collections and services throughout Australia.

The Library’s recent role as an originator and manager of travelling exhibitions continued in the year under review. Travelling exhibitions are devised against criteria of ease of movement, low cost to borrowing venues and potential to reach new audiences, as well as the traditional criteria of scholarship and security of works on tour. Examples include the exhibition Harold Cazneaux: Photographs, which had seasons at six regional and metropolitan venues, while ‘It’s about Friendship’—Rom: A Ceremony from Arnhem Land travelled to Alice Springs and Maningrida, Northern Territory. Another highly successful exhibition at the Library was For King and Country, which told the story of the recruitment campaigns for the First World War in Australia. Based on key collections of ephemeral material, posters and music scores, the exhibition drew wide praise and proved to be a valuable resource for schools.

Substantial funding was received from the Visions of Australia program for Dance People Dance, which showcases the Library’s collections on twentieth-century dance in Australia. The exhibition has been built around a robust travelling core, composed of reproductions, which can go to venues without the usual required security or climate-controlled conditions, such as theatre foyers. Nine venues have been secured for a tour that will last well into 1999.

National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery (NPG), located at the Old Parliament House, was administered by the Library until the end of the reporting year, when the three-year part funding provided by the government to run the gallery ended. The government is now considering an improved single-management structure for the Old Parliament House.

The Gallery’s exhibitions continued to highlight the hidden wealth of good portraiture in both institutional and private collections, with half of the works exhibited coming from private and university collections not easily visited by the public. Three exhibitions were held during the year, attracting over 80 000 visitors. The Clever Country: Scientists in Australia ran from June to November, and Decade of Flair: The Seventies was opened in November by Ita Buttrose and received good press coverage. The combination of nostalgia and sober reappraisal of the decade had wide appeal which contributed to making this the most popular exhibition to date. A Face in the Crowd opened in late May. In a very accessible way, this exhibition challenged preconceptions about what constitutes a portrait. It was the first of our exhibitions to be curated by a practising artist.

A selection of works from In the Picture: Creative Australians from the National Library’s Portrait Collection was displayed in the foyer of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre where it was seen by an estimated 273 000 people.

Publishing Program

In keeping with its charter to provide greater accessibility to and awareness of its documentary collections, the Library published a number of print titles during the year. Australia’s Timeless Gardens by Judith Baskin and Trisha Dixon publishes a wide-ranging survey of material from the Library’s Pictorial Collection (with accompanying text) relating to the history of Australia’s domestic gardens. A Woman of Courage: The Journal of Rose de Freycinet on her Voyage around the World 1817–1820 is the first complete translation into English—by Professor Serge Rivière—of this important journal. My Darling Mick: The Life of Granville Ryrie 1865–1937 presents the letters of war hero, Member of Parliament and High Commissioner to London, General Sir Granville Ryrie. Out of the Picture is a collection of short stories and reflective essays by Marion Halligan, each piece inspired
by photographs from the Library’s Pictorial Collection. The Morris West Trust Fund publication Encounter at Nagalarramba by Roslyn Poignant with Axel Poignant’s photographs, tells of a meeting between photographer Axel Poignant and Arnhem Land’s Maningrida community through numerous photographs and an accompanying commentary.

The Hazel de Berg Collection of oral history tape recordings was showcased through the release of Australian Poetry Live, a cassette and booklet featuring readings by leading Australian poets of their own works. Fears and Phobias: E.L. Piesse and the Problem of Japan 1909–39 by Neville Meaney was published as the first in the Library’s Occasional Papers Series. It gives a portrait of a key author of Australian defence policy, and an analysis of Japan’s intentions towards Australia.

Two Library titles, With Fond Regards and The Angry Penguin (published last year), received design awards during the year, while Australia’s Timeless Gardens won a print industry award.

The Library’s trade publications program complements a smaller but active publishing program of library-related titles, fulfilling our objective of supporting the Australian library community. Sales of the National Library of Australia Copyright Guidelines, mentioned earlier, exceeded expectations.

The last paper copy issue of Australian National Bibliography appeared in December 1996. The decision to cease publication of the printed version of the Australian National Bibliography was taken last year, as part of the Library’s program of continuously assessing the cost-effectiveness of various services and products, especially in light of rapidly changing methods of delivering data. From December 1996, national bibliographical data was made available via electronic file transfer from the Library.

The Winter 1997 issue of the Library’s quarterly journal, Voices, was also its last. Voices’ declining subscription base, together with its continued failure to meet forecast revenue targets, compelled the Library reluctantly to take the decision to cease publication. The year’s four issues focused on the themes culture and identity; ‘Reimagining the Pacific’; private papers, letters and diaries; and architecture.

The National Library Shop performed well during the year with an increase of 15% in cash receipts.

Multimedia publishing

The Library continued to work on a CD-ROM featuring the Endeavour journal—a joint publishing project with the Australian National Maritime Museum. The Endeavour journal is one of the Library’s most important and popular collection items, and the CD-ROM will provide information on a wide variety of aspects associated with Cook’s journey on the Endeavour, as well as providing a facsimile and transcript of the journal itself. Production was almost completed by the end of the year, and final testing and publication will occur early in 1997–98. Regular maintenance and updates of the interactive multimedia kiosks in the Kenneth Baillieu Myer Visitor Centre also continued during the year.

Educational services

The Library’s educational services promote and explain the Library’s collections, and are an important means of informing and involving the public in Library activities. This year we held a number of well-attended and favourably evaluated public programs, including seminars on the use of private papers and on writing biography, and a program of Sunday readings by prominent Australian authors. Increasingly the section disseminates its programs nationally by turning to new technologies. An online seminar series provides wide access to the papers presented by on-site guest speakers, and provides the opportunity for continued discussion. A teachers’ kit supporting the Dance People Dance exhibition will contain a photo-bank on CD.

Friends of the National Library of Australia

The Friends of the National Library revamped its presence on the Library’s World Wide Web server, where it now publishes the monthly Friends page that appears in the National Library of Australia News. In November, the Friends celebrated Ruth Park’s contribution to Australian book culture, and published in print and online the tribute Ruth Park: A Celebration. Friends are becoming increasingly interested in using the Internet, and this interest is reflected in the continuing series of Internet awareness and familiarisation evenings offered to them. In 1996–97, as part of the Young Friends initiative, the Friends supported awards for young writers, a successful program that will continue next year. Another successful innovation has been the Book at Lunchtime series, a program of visiting authors.

Volunteers

During the year, the Library developed new policy and programs to guide the work of a growing number of volunteers. Work continues on developing a program for recruiting and training volunteer guides.


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