State+Library+Evolution

The Evolution of the State Library of Victoria

The State Library of Victoria is more than one hundred and fifty years old, however, it wasn’t always as it is today. Over the course of those one hundred and fifty odd years, the Library has been through many drastic changes, including the evolution of both the building and its contents.

Technology

An inevitable change to the Library would be its technology. When it was first opened by Edward McArthur on the 11th of February, 1856, the Library obviously didn’t have any of its electronics (which is probably due to the fact that most of this technology had been invented yet). However, over the years, the Library hasn’t failed to keep up with the latest electronical equipment. Over the last ten years, hundreds and thousands of its rare collections have been digitised.

Computers are freely available to the public and the Library’s entire catalogue also is free to access online. Although the Library is not a lending one, membership cards are available, giving you free access to all of the Library’s items, including the 90% of them which are held in storage.

The Experimedia Room is another example of the Library’s evolution. Any members of the Library can enter, and have free access to the technology there. However, a form of identification is needed to access some of the electronics, including the wii. This wing also includes several playstations, a huge plasma TV screen and a giant chess board. Under the strict guidance of Sir Redmond Barry, the Library certainly didn’t start off like this. The band Faker even filmed their music video ‘Hurricane’ in the La Trobe Reading room, using the original furniture as props. Redmond Barry would certainly have reason to be turning around in his grave.

Books

Books, of course, are another aspect of the State Library that has changed tenfold. Upon first opening, the Library had a collection of only 3,846 volumes. Although that number in itself may seem to be a lot, what came next landslides it to none. Five years after its opening, in 1861, the Library’s new collections contained over 27,000 titles. Another four years later, in 1865, the Library held over 38,000 books. This number more than doubled in size over the next decade. A major influence to this increase would be the Victorian Copyright Protection Act passed in 1869. It stated that for every book, magazine, pamphlet and map published in Victoria, an additional copy was to be stored at the Library. By the 1880s, the State Library was the largest library in all of Australia’s colonies.

But it wasn’t just the quantity of the books that changed, but also the content. Before the 1880s, every single book in the State Library had to meet strict criteria laid down by Sir Redmond Barry, the Library’s founder. Famously, this excluded all books classified as works of fiction and of the imagination. But in 1880, the death of Redmond Barry marked an influential day for both the Library and its contents. The State Library of Victoria was no longer guided by a single hand. By the 1950s, the Library’s main focus had evolved into acquiring Australian, and particularly Victorian, material. Nowadays, the materials being collected by the Library contravene nearly all of Barry’s rules of exclusion.

The Building

The Library itself has also evolved over time. The building was first built with a fund of 10,000 pounds, but the original Library was only one fourth of what Redmond Barry had planned. As written in The Age on the 12th of February 1856, a delay was made in the construction of the Library due to the tightness of the Government’s Treasury and as a result, it took almost two years to complete this first section of the State Library. With an extra 20,000 pounds granted by the Government in 1859, the second section of the State Library was completed. This area included the Library’s first reading room, the Queen’s Reading Room (now Queen’s Hall) and this section was opened to the public on the same year of its completion.

In 1959, the dome skylights of the La Trobe Reading Room were damaged by water leakage, and consequently had to be covered in copper sheets, the costs involved in repairing the dome proving to be too expensive. However, this leakage was repaired during the major refurbishments to the Library’s building that took place from 1990-2004. Approximately 200 million dollars were spent during these fourteen years.

However, the chairs and tables in the La Trobe Reading Room remain the original furniture, so unlike many other aspects of Victoria’s State Library, they at least have stayed unchanged.

By Nicola

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