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Lost in Translation: Collecting Australian Authors Published Overseas

Under the terms of the National Library Act 1960, the National Library is responsible for maintaining and developing a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the Australian people. The Library’s collections of Australiana have developed into the nation’s single most important resource of materials recording Australian cultural heritage.

Collecting Australiana published in book form has been greatly facilitated by legal deposit provisions in the Copyright Act 1968, which states that a copy of any work published must be deposited with the National Library of Australia. However, for Australiana published overseas there is no such legal provision to facilitate this process. This makes collecting a particularly difficult and challenging undertaking. The Library has arrangements with some overseas suppliers to obtain works by Australian authors or about Australia, but this material can be difficult to identify and obtain. This is compounded by the fact that Australian authors are increasingly finding a niche in overseas book markets and many Australian fiction authors are receiving increased exposure as a result of being shortlisted for prestigious literary prizes. For example, Sonya Hartnett recently won the prestigious 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award—the world’s largest for children’s and youth literature—and, in 2007 Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This increased exposure seems to have sparked a general interest in the publication of other Australian authors overseas in various languages as well as English.

Searching for material

In recent years, the Library’s Overseas Collection Development Unit (OCDU) has been undertaking extensive annual scans of Australian authors published overseas to identify gaps where material has not been supplied. Prior to 2008, these were undertaken individually on overseas national library catalogues. As national libraries are responsible for collecting all publications issued in their respective countries, searching the catalogues was seen as the best guide to publications issued in a particular country. While this cumbersome process yielded quite a few titles in the past, in 2008, for the first time, OCDU staff approached this task in a different way and searched federated discovery databases such as WorldCat—which contains bibliographic citations to the collections and services of more than 10 000 libraries worldwide—and The European Library network, a federated search service which covers the catalogues of 32 European national libraries. This significantly increased the number of titles identified as being published overseas by Australian authors. Unfortunately this has been a manual process, as there is no alert mechanism that can be run automatically against these databases to facilitate selection of titles by Australian authors. During this exercise it was also noticed that most of the titles located on WorldCat and The European Library had no Australian library holdings.

A snapshot from the 2008 annual author scan for titles published after 2005 reveals some interesting results. Of 1013 titles identified, representing 292 authors, 53.8 per cent were in a language other than English—4.7 per cent of these in an Asian language. We found titles published in 48 countries, ranging from one title in Iceland to 441 in the United Kingdom and United States of America. The results also reflect Australian authors are quite heavily published in European countries, including Eastern Europe, with Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Russia being the most prominent. However, the latest scan revealed that Australian authors are being published in Asia, South America—Brazil, in particular—and the Middle East, regions in which the Library has traditionally struggled to find their works. This trend is also evident amongst Australian academic authors, who are also being extensively published overseas by academic publishers. While most such works are published in the United Kingdom and United States, a reasonable number are also being published in the Netherlands and Germany.

Published authors

Anecdotally, Australian children’s and science fiction authors seem to be particularly popular overseas. This year our most prolifically published author was Emily Rodda, who accounted for 10 per cent of titles identified. Other popular authors include J.M. Coetzee, Colleen McCullough, Garth Nix, Jan Ormerod, Michael White, Tamara McKinley, Liane Hearn, John Marsden, Catherine Jinks, Markus Zusak and Trudi Canavan. Perhaps the most unusual title we located was a title by John Pilger published in Iran about the Iran–Iraq war from 1980–1988.

The Library remains committed to the collecting of Australiana published overseas and will continue to seek improvements in the identification and supply of this material to ensure it is preserved in the National Collection.

Vera Dunn
Collection Development Librarian, Overseas Collection Development Unit