IN DEPTH
Two Libraries, two continents, one secondment:
An Australian Experience
The opportunity to move to the other side of the world doesn’t come up every day, but a secondment to The State Library of New South Wales to work with its rare books collection provided Dr Karen Attar with the perfect chance to gain a new perspective. Here she looks back at her experience and the similarities and differences she encountered.
THE State Library of New South Wales in Sydney is 10,552 miles away from the University of London. Rooted in the Aus- tralian Subscription Library of 1826, it’s an older library in a newer country – by contrast, the University of London was founded in 1836, and its library was not established until 1871.
The State Library building is both older and newer than London’s iconic Senate House (1937). The Mitchell Library opened in 1910; the adjoining Macquarie Street building in 1988. Moving from London to Sydney on a secondment to work on the State Library’s rare books revealed some differences and more similarities.
The State Library’s remit is to collect and pre- serve materials pertaining in any way to New South Wales, and it is a legal deposit library for material published in the state. Its relation- ship with the National Library of Australia is analogous with that of the National Library of Scotland or the National Library of Wales to the British Library. The Library functions as both a research and a public library to serve the population of New South Wales from the cradle to the grave.
I responded to an advertisement for a rare books librarian to upgrade rare book catalogue records and train members of the permanent staff, because I felt that after 20 years at Senate House Library, University of London it would be salutary to experience first hand how another
24 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Karen Attar is the Rare Books Librarian at Senate House Library and a Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies.
organisation works; one that would combine resemblances to Senate House as a University library with differences arising from the broader readership. I also wanted to deal with different collections, and was not disappointed.
The familiar
A wonderful aspect of Anglo-American (including Australian) librarianship is its unity. We use the same systems: the State Library catalogues books on Alma (with Sierra a living memory) and archives on Axiell. We follow the same conservation standards and cataloguing rules and most of the same authority headings. We all rely on the Office 365 package, we use the same photocopiers-cum-printers. Standard corporate practice follows the same lines. We struggle with the same principles and
April-May 2024
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