An Institution Betrayed

GH on the State Library's post-literate plans

Pardon me that this feels a little personal.

The domed reading room

I first visited the State Library of Victoria aged twelve. I held books retrieved from its mountainous stacks with trembling hands. Its stupendous card catalogue blew my schoolboy’s mind. Search my name in the modern electronic counterpart today and it appears 125 times, mostly for works I researched there. My eighty-four-year-old mother has been a volunteer library tour guide more than a decade.

That doesn’t make me special, by the way. A helluva lot of Victorians feel strongly connected to the library, an institution in the very best of senses. Which is why we are aghast at the apparent enshittification of its core functions mooted by management’s ‘Strategic Reorganisation Change Proposal’, which would cut almost forty jobs, and more than halve the number of reference librarians, whose number were halved as recently as 2019.

By the end of this crude self-lobotomy, it is envisaged that the world’s third busiest library, which receives almost three million in-person visits a year, will have just ten reference librarians.

It happens that the SLV is simultaneously staging an exhibition about misinformation. Such irony: reference librarians are at the front line of the battle against the rising tide of fake news and AI slop.

Needless to say, the proposal reads like corporate bullshit bingo. It could concern the workings of any bureaucracy, a bank, or even a factory. Its authors are anonymous. It’s not even obvious it saves any money.

That it appears to betray the barest understanding of the institution is unsurprising when you consider that the SLV board is a parade of professional services types - the kind that government is always lending its watch to in order to ask the time – while the role of chief librarian was abolished a decade ago in favour of a ‘CEO’.

That ‘CEO’ at the moment is an accountant called John Wicks, formerly the COO, promoted to the top job on an interim basis when the previous office holder’s contract was not renewed. Wicks has worked extensively in galleries and museums, though, again, not in libraries. That matters.

Beautiful Queen’s Hall

Because any habitué will tell you that things have been out of kilter at the library a while. Back in April, for example, there was a great fuss about A Mouthful of Dust, a ‘web experience’ of Ned Kelly promising ‘an impressive journey into the heart of Australia’s most notorious outlaw’.

A Mouthful of Dust is actually the kind of overengineered digital pap designed so Very Important People can coo about ‘innovation’ even as it imparts little useful information and is bound in a few years to look like crap. You also wonder what the library’s founder Sir Redmond Barry would make of the SLV’s ongoing fetishising of Kelly, whom Barry, of course, sentenced to death.

He’d be appalled

A further bad sign came a few months ago when management invited tenders for the lease on its downstairs space at the corner of Swanston and La Trobe Streets, occupied the last seven years by Mr Tulk, the library’s bright and beloved cafe.

Proprietor Michael Togias has thrown heart and soul into building ‘the people’s cafe for the people’s library’, soldiering on through the disruptions of renovations, road works and COVID. A convoluted and opaque process ended with the lease’s awarding to The Big Group, a corporate catering behemoth as cosy and inviting as its name.

Michael did relate a funny story of finally being introduced to the CEO though. Wicks seems to have thought that Michael was ‘Mr Tulk’ himself - in fact, the cafe is named for the inaugural state librarian, Augustus, whose portrait hangs in the Redmond Barry Reading Room.

If that’s so, I can’t help feeling that this is a tell. Those running the library seem not to see their institution as a library at all, in the sense of furthering the diffusion of knowledge or the nourishment of community. They see it as a cultural destination or an events space, the books and artefacts serving a largely scenic purpose. This would explain present trends, whose logical conclusion is a library without librarians – the perfect counterpoint to Yes Minister’s hospital without patients.

The reference librarians at the SLV speak for centuries of institutional knowledge. They know the collection in all its stupendous detail; they’re also the people who’ll cheerfully locate that book that may have been misshelved, fix that temperamental microfiche reader, or perform any of a myriad of daily tasks for a veteran user or first-time visitor alike.

So, yes, this is personal, but it’s also global. If the suits can come for the State Library of Victoria, they can come for anyone, and no public institution is safe. At the weekend, by the way, I showed the library to Tom Holland, one half of the juggernaut that is the podcast The Rest Is History ahead of its sold-out live show. He was, like me those many decades ago, blown away. I then explained to him the Strategic Reorganisation Change Proposal. ‘That is so, so stupid,’ he said. And it is.

This also appears at The Guardian.