Nightmare on Molesworth Street
The editorial in the latest Listener is about the wisdom of spending $70 million on revamping the National Library to be an attraction on the scale of Te Papa.
That being a tourist attraction has become a leading ambition for the National Library is both alarming and bizarre. As former Alexander Turnbull librarian Jim Traue recently pointed out, the library’s role has never been that of a street-front library, but as a national backstop for the whole library system. It is equivalent to the Reserve Bank, as opposed to a retail bank touting for customers.
It is desirable that the library’s collections be made accessible to all New Zealanders. But “accessible” does not require the whole ground floor to be turned into a digital penny arcade with banks of high-tech equipment, a Kids’ Zone and al-Jazeera flashing, housed in a contemporary architectural extravaganza.
That would be to Adam’s mind a Nightmare on Molesworth Street, not the treasure house that it should be.
The idea of Disneyland on Molesworth St is pure folly. The library’s senior management have failed to grasp that the whole point of the digital age is it happens on a screen in someone’s home on their laptop. Google and Facebook need no buildings or buses of tourists to draw people into their world.
Misguided extravagance is only the half of it. The National Library has failed to provide convincing assurances that the plans will not compromise its core function as an intellectual storehouse for researchers and historians.
Clearly as the extract above indicates something seems amiss. Adam believes our National Library is a great insitution, but he would rather the budget went on digitizing more of the collections to make them accessible throughout NZ and the world.
Therefore he agrees with the editorial’s conclusion:-
The National Government has made less than enthusiastic noises about the proposal. It should ask for an independent assessment, including whether it would represent value for money, and whether it is the best way to meet the library’s primary purpose.
If the redevelopment goes ahead as currently proposed, it will not be the blueprint for the protection and enhancement of New Zealand’s documented heritage. Rather, it will stand proud as a monument to an era of spending decisions made with a cavalier disregard for the people who pay the bill.
Is it possible that some parts of the public service have yet to catch up with the new world we live in today.
See also this article by Jim Traue, a former Chief Librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Libray at the NZ Herald. Mr Traue was critical of the proposals. The Herald ran a response from the current head of the Turnbull. In Adam’s view it did not really address a number of the issues raised by Traue and The Listener.
Comments are closed.
Virginia
I will take a look at the announcement. Have been meaning to write some more on this. I much appreciated Nat’s comment it was most illuminating.
Penny Carnaby was interviewed by Sean Plunket on Morning Report today. Not a great interview I am afraid.
I appreciated Nat’s careful response. But, now that a big funding cut has reportedly been applied, I would hope that the design integrity of the original building will be preserved in the project “rethink”.
Hi, Adam. I’d be a bit skeptical about that editorial. I’m on the Library Information Advisory Commission (we advise the Minister about library matters, we don’t answer to the National Library). Here’s my take.
The current building is falling to pieces: leaking pipes, sewage problems, etc. It’s absolutely not a safe place to house the collection and it has to be repaired. The bulk of the cost of the National Library building project is on the repairs. To repair it, you *must* take everything out, repair, then return everything. It’s a terrible situation–nobody *wants* to have to handle the kilometers of items, but they must or else they risk ruining the collection.
Once you accept that, as undesirable as it is, you *must* move everything out … then you say “well, if we have to shoulder this expense then we’d better make sure we do as much as we can to future-proof the building while we can.” You’d feel a mug if, in five years, you had to improve the building again.
The “Disneyland on Molesworth Street” is a brilliant line, but it’s not what we’re looking at. The idea of a public space for the National Library is really about improving the public’s access to the collections held in their name. If you’re a Kiwi, the National Library is invaluable if you’re a researcher but otherwise it offers nothing to you. Yet it holds some pretty significant documents for Kiwis: the Treaty of Waitangi, photographs of the return of the Maori Battalion, the notebooks of Katherine Mansfield, match reports from the 1905 All Blacks tour, the first map showing the Pacific Ocean …. These must be digitised (and many will be during the move–there’s a heap of digitising being done while the collections are out of the building) but seeing the frail original documents, the handwriting on them, the care (or lack thereof) in them–you get a different experience than you do looking at them online.
If you’ve got New Zealand’s heritage in your vaults, it’d be selfish and stupid not to show it. Not because you hope to get 400k German tourists gawping at it every weekend, but because it’s your obligation to Kiwis. We pay for the upkeep of the library, we should get to see our heritage without having to be an academic researcher. When you think of it like that, who would argue that only an academic elite should get to see our national treasures?
The trick is not to see it as either-or: either we scan and put on line, OR we show them to the public. The library has an obligation to do *both*!
I haven’t seen the National Library’s plans, so I can’t comment on their worth. However, I have been to an exhibition there while visiting Wellington, and can also point out that some libraries have some pretty amazing stuff (such as the Hocken Library’s magnificent collection of paintings). Generally, I would have thought that lots of glass would not be desirable (light is not that friendly).
Also, on another note, I think that storing infrequently used things in a high quality location elsewhere can work well in terms of a usable space. Again with a Dunedin example, the university library carries a relatively small portion of the university’s books, and is a better and more usable space for it. For the most part it is only staff and postgrads who ever (infrequently) venture to the buildings where the books actually are (the former M.O.T. Testing Station).
I agree this is poor prioritising of $$ spend. However, I remain concerned at the plan physically to move everything out and then back in again once redevelopment complete. VM
Virgina
Many thanks for commenting.
I think the artefacts are safe at this time.
Concern must be with why the NL wants to be a tourist attraction or a Te Papa.
Why not put the money into more digitization and increase online access.
A glasshouse on Molesworth Street does not make sense.
That is why I called it Nightmare on Molesworth Street.
Thank you again
Please stop by and comment again
I love the National Library building and its strange hulking presence. Apparently it is a building, in any case, that is worth keeping intact as an example of its architectural era (as pointed out in a letter to the ed of The Listener, by an architect who knows a bit more about these things than I do). But far more scarily, the fact that librarians in charge of hundreds of thousands of documents that represent our heritage are now packing these up and shifting them out to factories elsewhere… this must place priceless material at risk of loss or damage, no matter how much care is taken. It’s crazy.
Virginia McMillan