Page 770 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 5 April 2022
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understand, it was not exactly a useful or accessible community facility, to say the least.
This model of private, exclusive and inaccessible libraries continued for another 2,000 years. There were similar examples in the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and into the colonial period.
The push for equality within society at the turn of the 20th century led to a push to open up libraries as well, and make knowledge and lifelong learning accessible to the masses. The first local public lending libraries were championed by wealthy philanthropists and, in particular, a Scottish man by the name of Andrew Carnegie, in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia and other countries during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Carnegie’s model was to provide a comparatively small amount of money to a city or jurisdiction to build and initially staff a small and simple but functional library that was accessible to all. Part of the agreement was that the jurisdiction would continue to fund, staff and maintain the library for the benefit of the local public. This is in contrast to previous public libraries, which, while free to access, were bigger, grander, located in bigger metropolitan areas and less accessible to people in general.
Work by Carnegie really pushed the idea that libraries should be simple but highly functional and accessible institutions for everyone, leading to the subsequent development of the library model we now recognise from the 1890s onwards.
The library as a place of written record keeping and lifelong learning came to Australia through colonialist aspirations and has been a feature of Australian society for over 150 years. The Melbourne Public Library, which is now well known as the State Library of Victoria, was established in 1854. This means it was not only the first public library to be opened in this country but also one of the first to be opened in the world. South Australia has a particularly interesting history of acknowledging the importance of libraries. The plans for the public library were already in the works before colonists arrived in 1836. The intent of this group of people who colonised South Australia was to bring written material to provide for “the cultivation and diffusion of useful knowledge throughout the colony”.
Moving even closer to our time, the government of Gough Whitlam employed the respected librarian Allan Horton to come up with ways to improve the usefulness of libraries and their connections to the community. He put together a report called Libraries are great mate! but they could be greater. From this report the government expanded and improved libraries in the late 1970s and onwards.
This long history of improving on, maintaining and expanding library facilities shows the acknowledgement of the importance libraries play in social, cultural and educational access and infrastructure.
Libraries have evolved over this time to recognise a wide range of histories that historically have been invisible, such as the oral histories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that I mentioned earlier. Libraries such as the National Film and
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