Public Sector Informant | The National Library of Australia is facing a crisis and it affects all of us

Ongoing funding for what goes into these public buildings is harder to get, as the director-general of the National Library of Australia, Dr Marie-Louise Ayres, told us in a public address on October 26. Dr Ayres spoke to those of us in the broad research community to explain why large parts of the library's collection will be unavailable well into March or April next year.

That's right, the national repository of our knowledge is having to severely limit access to all those people who depend on it to get their books or PhDs or family histories or even school projects completed.

How did it come to this? The library's roof was severely damaged in Canberra's January 2020 hail storm. And then it took ages to get repair materials and insurance sign-off. And then the repairers found asbestos-contaminated material throughout the roof. And it didn't stop raining. Dr Ayres showed some distressing scenes of soaked shelves of priceless materials, leading to kilometres of shelving having to be wrapped in plastic.

The weather damage, however, is indicative of a larger emergency. Not only does our National Library not have extra funding to cover this crisis, but its existing funding is also shrinking in both relative and absolute terms. In 10 years, the library has lost one-third of its staff, and the current staffing levels are one-half of what they were in the 1990s. A core function of the library is to collect a copy of every single book published in Australia. Added to its problems is the need to find more external storage space in 2025 when a current lease expires. This is a library that has to both maintain its collection (280 linear kilometres in the main building, and more in storage) and continue to acquire new materials on Australia and its region.

I've seen the library at work from the inside. Last year I received one of their Asia Research Grants to work on their unique holdings related to Australia's connection to Indonesia, part of a larger research project I lead which is primarily funded by the Australian Research Council. The access to published materials and personal manuscripts was facilitated by collegial librarians and other staff who really love and know the collection. But I could also tell that staff reductions had affected their work and increased their workloads.

A library is not just its books, it's also the people who love and care for these treasures, who conserve, catalogue and make them available to the public. I shared an office in part of the section that used to be the Asian Reading Room, a specialist area once devoted to one of the library's areas of significance. Sadly, that legendary room closed as part of the staffing cuts. The library has also had to stop collecting materials from parts of Asia, particularly North Asia, despite large protests from the Asian Studies community. When asked about the future of the existing collection, a moment of passion broke through the calmness of the director-general's delivery when she assured the audience that "deaccessioning the Asian collections would be over my dead body." It's not hard to see the strains in the institution and the pressures on everyone.

How did it come to this?

"Efficiency dividends". Governments on both sides have seen our national cultural institutions as a soft target for budget cuts. In the late 1980s, the Labor government systematised annual cuts: shrinking the budget, and making people do more with less money each year. The reward for the institutions has been to get even less the next year as part of a 'dividend' (I'm not sure who to). An early version of the term made it into prime-ministerial speech-writer Don Watson's Weasel Words, although some of us call it something less polite. In the next year, the National Library's budget will fall by twenty-one per cent on its 2022 level.

The sharp fall is partly explained by temporary funding the library received for Trove. For those who have not yet discovered it, Trove digitises our newspapers going back to the earliest publications of the colony of New South Wales. You want to find your great-grandmother's engagement notice - it's at your fingertips in a few minutes. Trove has expanded into all kinds of publications and photographs, official and privately produced. It is adding other public data.

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In terms of international best practice for making digital libraries and archives freely available, the National Library and National Archives of Australia have been out in front of the global field for a long time. Digitisation, however, requires time and money. Someone has to copy the material, provide metadata and upload it. It also requires cyber-security and other forms of maintenance, as well as constant upgrading of the technology. Alison Dellit, the library's senior executive in charge of Trove, gave the depressing news that Trove runs out of money in June 2023. There is no long-term commitment to it from the government.

The National Library's problems are shared by nearly all of our major cultural institutions - the National Gallery, the National Archives and a raft of related repositories and places for collecting and creating. The National Library's roofing crisis puts the general problems in sharper relief. This is not just of concern to the nerds, historians, people in the arts or social researchers. These bodies are the heart and soul of the nation. Without them, we cannot understand who we are and what our position in the world is.

What then is to be done? The answer is simple and complex: governments need to commit to long-term, ongoing, indexed funding at the least. Restore the money lost in the cuts. And Trove needs its own dedicated funding. User-pays access is not an option, because these are public goods, part of our common heritage. These places embody the long-term consciousness of the nation. They have to be underwritten by long-term guarantees.