The National Library of New Zealand
The readiest source of summary information is Susan Bartel (1993). The
Library as a major government agency is required to publish a corporate
plan and to furnish an annual report setting out its policies,
programmes and activities. These reports are issued as public documents.
Parallel with these are the annual reports of the Trustees of the
National Library.
The institution which
came into existence with the enactment of the National Library Act 1965
was a merging of several institutions: the General Assembly Library, the
Alexander Turnbull Library, and the National Library Service (itself an
earlier merging of the National Library Centre, the Country Library
Service, the School Library Service, and the Library School). These were
joined in 1989 by the National Film Library.
A national library was
a major structural element in the library system that had been envisaged
in the succession of reviews of the country's library services by
overseas experts. An even earlier example of a national library model,
proposed by the Librarian of the General Assembly Library in 1915, can
be seen in Griffith (1987). Later models were provided in the Munn-Barr
Report and in the 1960 Osborn report.
The national library
concept was the object of one of the most persistent campaigns pursued
by the library profession. It was a campaign which in its later stages
became bitterly divisive. The professional opposition that was mounted
in the early 1960s against the government's proposal for a national
library stemmed from concerns about a loss of identity by the Alexander
Turnbull Library and the General Assembly Library. Ironically the
situation 30 years later sees the Parliamentary Library existing
independently of the National Library, the Alexander Turnbull Library
maintaining a clear and strong identity, and many of the elements of the
old National Library Service demolished or diminished greatly in
importance.
The various schemes
for a national library proposed a monolithic structure, similar to those
that existed in other countries. However, it is generally believed that
the seed of the National Library as it came to develop in this country
was planted well away from a major urban centre, in a rural education
scheme that operated in Canterbury in the early 1930s: Alley (1950). The
attention of the new Labour government was caught by the idea of books
carried to people in rural areas, and by the man at the scheme's
frontline. The Country Library Service was established in 1938 to
develop the concept nationally. The story of the service is told in
Alley (1956) and in several articles in a special issue of New Zealand Libraries (1967). Mention must be
made also of a brief note published two years after the latter, which
sets out to demonstrate the powerful role played by ministerial advisers
in this development: Sutch (1969).
Further development of
the national library concept was an organic and incremental process. The
Country Library Service set up a schools section in 1942 to provide
specifically for children in rural areas; in 1951 this became the School
Library Service. The New Zealand Library School, providing training in
librarianship for graduates, began in 1946. The National Library Centre
grew in scale as it took over administration of national bibliographical
activities, many of them initiated by the New Zealand Library
Association or groups of libraries: the National Union Catalogue, the
Interloan Scheme, the Union List of Serials in New Zealand Libraries,
and the Index to New Zealand Periodicals. This development took the
National Library Service to a point where the formation of a National
Library from the merger of this and the other national libraries
(Alexander Turnbull and General Assembly) seemed a logical progression.
The NZLA intensified
its campaign in the 1950s, to a point where the government agreed to set
up a Parliamentary Select Committee to investigate the proposition.
Perry (1958) provides a summary history of the campaign and a commentary
on the report of the Committee. The Association found itself making
submissions again in 1961, to a Royal Commission on the State Services;
the submissions are set out in NZLA (1961). The Royal Commission's
recommendations regarding a national library were published in New Zealand Libraries ('Royal Commission on the
State Services', 1962). In 1963 the government announced its intention
to form a National Library, and in 1964 appointed the first National
Librarian. The enabling Act was passed in 1965. An unusual perspective
on the political campaign is provided by the Minister in charge of the
Bill at the time: Kinsella (1990). A unique and useful record of the
campaign, made by Stuart Perry (1972a), is in the collection of
Wellington Public Library. It comprises letters, reports, minutes and
other documents accumulated through a long involvement with committees
and working parties.
With the institution
firmly established the library profession next turned its attention to
the accommodation difficulties of the National Library. At the height of
the problem the Library was occupying 13 buildings in Wellington, not
one purpose-built. New Zealand Libraries
published in 1973 a chronology of the National Library and its buildings
in Wellington: Olsson (1973). Conditions were to get much worse before
the building in Molesworth Street was opened in 1987. The professional
project manager of the Library retails the story of the new building's
planning and construction: Alan Smith (1989), and an architect provides
an independent appraisal of the completed building: Alington (1988).
The most comprehensive
description of the functions and achievements of the National Library,
when it was most active and its influence was most pervasive, can be
found in a chapter of the handbook that was supplied to library
students: New Zealand Library Association. Certificate
Course, Paper A: Library Service in New Zealand (1972).
The record for the
1980s and 1990s is most readily to be found in the annual reports of the
Library. Although they came increasingly to be couched in the language
of state corporatism and management-speak, there can be discerned
through them a trend away from the classical functions of a national
library to those of an agency seeking simply to coordinate the
activities of other libraries in the country, and to provide some
bibliographical services, where possible on a cost-recovery basis.
A person wishing to
trace the shift in philosophy might find enlightenment in reading the
personal statements of successive National Librarians, made on those
occasions when fundamental values are exposed, broad policies are
sketched and futures are predicted: Alley (1967), Macaskill (1971),
McIntosh (1973), Scott (1987, 1991).
Anyone searching for
turning points in a trend as significant as the reformation of the
National Library might wish to contemplate the brief and limited debate
that occurred in the mid 1970s, about the desirability of developing a
national lending library, on the model of the British Library at Boston
Spa. Ken Porter (1975) was the advocate; R.W. Hlavac (1977), speaking
for a NZLA working party, said in effect 'not like that, and not yet',
preferring to see completion of the National Library building, and a
strengthening of the Library's role as a coordinator of interloan and as
a lender of last resort for research material. The subsequent dispersal
of the strong central collection of the Library might be seen as rooted
in the latter view of the Library's role.
National Library
strategic policy in recent years has been based amongst other things
upon a development doctrine known by librarians as 'resource sharing'.
The theory would have it that sharing of resources, by various
processes, produces a national information 'stock' which is
significantly greater than the sum of the individual parts.
The Library Interloan
Scheme was the first of these processes that was put in place. Initially
it was a contractual arrangement between certain libraries, lending and
borrowing from one another on roughly equal terms. In time, with the
involvement of the National Library and its stock, it grew into a scheme
for balancing the strongest and the weakest ends of the library system.
Wylie (1981) analyses the patterns of interloan borrowing and lending in
the period 1959 to 1979. The joint committee of the National Library and
the NZLA/NZLIA, which administered the scheme in the latter years,
collects and publishes annual statistics of interloan traffic. Janet
Caudwell (1987) shortly after a radical change in the rules of the
Interloan Scheme published an article on the state and likely future of
the Scheme.