Once again Mr Gums and I have left daughter and dog at home in order to hit the road – well, in this case, the skies as by the time this is published we will be in Hong Kong. My posting and commenting will consequently somewhat sporadic for the next week…and so I decided to make this Monday musings a simple one.
National Library of Australia, viewed from Commonwealth Park on the opposite side of Lake Burley Griffin
Now, my real literary home is, as for most of us I expect, my childhood. That is where my love of reading started. I cannot remember a time without books. My parents read, and encouraged reading. Books were my favourite presents. For me, this all translated into choosing librarianship for my career, and this brings me to this post. I count myself lucky that my first professional job as a librarian was at the National Library of Australia. Eventually, the section I worked with separated and became a new institution. Since its work was where my heart lay, I went with it.
However, I have stayed close to the Library: I’m a “Friend” and, since taking early retirement a few years ago, I visit there regularly to read and research, attend seminars, visit the bookshop and exhibitions, and meet friends for lunch. I have heard many Australian writers speak there – including David Malouf, John Marsden, JM Coetzee, Geraldine Brooks, Janette Turner Hospital – and have seen some doing research there – including Kate Grenville.
Being our National Library, it is of course home to many of Australia’s most famous literary manuscripts – too numerous to mention here, but a fairly recent coup was the believed-to-have-been-destroyed papers of Patrick White. It is also where, due to legal deposit, you should be able to see any book published in Australia. A great resource!
The National Library has been one of the world’s forerunners in using and managing the digital domain. Here are some of its major projects:
- Pandora, the Australian web archive, was among the first attempts in the world to archive online information. It was established in 1996.
- Picture Australia is a federated search project providing access to image collections from institutions all over Australia. It was established in 1998.
- Newspaper Digitisation Project, to which I referred in last week’s Monday musings, is a project to digitise, using OCR technology, Australia’s early newspapers up to 1954. Since OCR technology – particularly when used on old newsprint with old printing technologies – results in a lot of “errors”, the National Library invites users to edit the articles. Anytime I use it, I do my correcting bit on the articles I find. The top user-corrector, recorded on the project’s home page, has now made nearly 560,000 corrections. 560,000!! Now, that’s a lot of participatory value the Library has harnessed.
- Trove is the Library’s latest big project and enables users to search “the deep web” for material relating to Australia and Australians. It uses modern search technologies to point to related material, to enable users to manage the information they find and contribute their own content, and to encourage users to actively engage with the library and each other through forums.
And there’s much more besides … but I’ll leave it here and let you explore my literary home through the links above while I explore Hong Kong …
Whispering Gums 
Oh, that is extrodinarily lucky getting your first librarian job at the NLA! I might be visiting an aunt in Canberra sometime next year, hopefully she’ll let me squeeze in a visit to the library, I’ve never been.
Hope you have a great time in Hong Kong!
I guess it was. I liked Canberra after having visited it a couple of times and so was very happy to apply for the NLA and leave Sydney (but, shh, don’t tell the Sydneyites that!)
Oops, forgot to say, Jess, that I’d be happy to meet up and take you to the NLA if you’d like – at least to the cafe, reading room and bookshop.
And HK is going nicely – very sore feel today though.
I went for a quick squiz last year and, to be honest, I was a little disappointed at how…umm, rectangular the building looked! In terms of architecture, I think the Victorian State Library is much grander but I suppose the important thing is what’s on the inside… 😀
Each to their own I suppose Mae! I love the NLA building, the way it is classical but modern, and yet not “brutal”. SLV like SLNSW are completely different, really, in the sense that they are old buildings. NLA was built in the late 1960s.
But what is really important as you say is what is inside and the service it provides … and the NLA is doing well there I think.
If I ever make it to Canberra I will definitely be going to visit the National Library.
You should Marg – as should every Australian. It’s our intellectual/cultural heart I reckon!
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I am learning so much from following your blog, which I find really exciting as a fellow Australian blogger. Yours is definitely one of the best blogs around. Thanks for all this excellent info, I will definitely be checking it out
Wow, thanks Becky for that vote of confidence … I’m having a bit of fun with the Monday Musings, trying to mix it up a bit. I’m glad I’ve introduced you to some new things to check out.
First, Hong Kong! Wow! I hope you enjoy your trip! Second, your first job as a librarian was at the National Library of Australia. Holy cow! That’s like me getting to work at the Library of Congress. Third, kudos to the NLA for all its digital work. They truly are world class and innovative. I’m reading about stuff they did/do in my school classes all the time.
Thanks Stefanie for all this. We are having a wonderful time in Hong Kong . Yesterday we saw the Big Buddha on Lantau island and had a vegetarian lunch at Po Lin Monastery, and today we are off to the New Territories. We visited a well recommended book store – Page One – last night and I bought a Hong Kong author’s book, The piano teacher. Could have bought more but must watch the suitcase!
That’s great that you keep hearing about the NLA in your course. It was getting a bit moribund but in themid 1990s it seemed to suddenly see the new information world light and just took off. My sense has been that it has been keeping up with/ahead of the game ever since but it is interesting to hear that from an external perspective. It just means you need to come visit some time doesn’t it!
Oh yes, I would love to visit sometime!
Well, you know who to talk to when you do, don’t you!
And daughter is very much enjoying spending time with the dog and the treats left for her in the fridge 🙂 (Is it bad to admit that I’m liking the All Bran more than almost everything, though? :P)
You failed to mention that the daughter *ahem* helped out the Trove people in their usability study! Which reminds me I have that $75 voucher to use… walk around the lake and coffee at Bookplate when you get back? xo
Looking forward to your travel posts on my birthplace and childhood home! Yes, decades ago and things have changed so much. But if you need any recommendations from locals, I could still check for you from friends there 😉 Have a wonderful trip!
Thanks Arti … I greatly appreciate your offer to get some ideas but I think we are OK. We had a wonderful intro on our second day from a local, and now only have a couple of days left, one of which is a trip to Macau. There is so much to do here? Hoew old were you when you left and have you been back?
Am not sure how much I’ll post here (though may do one post on it), but I will be putting photos on Facebook when we get back. If you are on Facebook and would like to see them let me know.
I was at the National Library yesterday. I love it too (although some works beginning in December have caused a bit of disruption in the reading room recently – the end where the journals rack usually stands is empty for the moment). I bought a wonderful book called Exiled at the library bookshop on my way out – the book is published by the library and draws on its collection of photographs of Port Arthur inmates. It is fascinating. Enjoy Hong Kong. We went to the most fantastic yum cha place. I’m sure you have all the information you need, but let me know if you want its name and I will ask my husband if he can remember it.
I hope you had a lovely lunch or snack at Bookplate too, while you were there. I love the bookshop – and rarely leave without buying something.
As for yum chas, we love yum chas but probably only have one free meal time left before we leave as the rest is planned but if it’s not too hard to discover the one you liked I’d love to know just in case it fits with our plans ie is near the places we still want to visit.
This afternoon we went to one of the outlying islands, Cheung Chau.It was lovely to get out of the city for a little while.
I’ve been to the NLA (and done some research there too, what a buzz!) but I’ve never been to HK and am intrigued by your account of its riches in these comments. I had thought it was just a great big shopping mall because that’s how it’s always promoted in the travel ads. (A bit like Australian travel ads promoting only The Great Outdoors and never anything about our cultural life.)
LOL Lisa … in some ways it is a great big shopping mall if you don’t look beneath, and is partly why I’ve never really given it a second thought. I’m a hopeless shopper – whenever we are near shops (which is a lot of the time we are not sightseeing) I feel I should shop but I look in one and then say to Len, let’s do that another time! It’s now our last night and I’m still saying that. There’s so much to see here otherwise though, and we’ll leave tomorrow not have done all we could and certainly not having done even the ones we have done at the depth we could have so I’d say do it sometimes. I’ll happily give you hints – as long as they are not shopping ones!
I love how technologically advanced the NLA have become. It’s great that they’re embracing and acknowledging the importance of it and is investing at new projects to help make their, undoubtedly, vast depository of material more widely accessible. I love the Newspaper Digitalisation Project and I play around with it now and again. The Trove is also excellent and I use it at work quite frequently (as one should when is a librarian).
Do you edit the newspaper articles Mae? I use Trove a bit too – it’s certainly a great tool isn’t it.