When I joined the School of Information studies at Charles Sturt University back in May 2019 I was intrigued to learn about the Study Visits that were run for students. These are week-long visits to an Australian city or region, with an itinerary packed with visits to interesting libraries and archives. As well as providing incredibly valuable learning opportunities for students, these visits also represent opportunities for lecturers to re-engage with practice, and see first-hand the work that information professionals are doing.
My first time leading a study a visit was for a trip to Sydney in September 2019. The Wednesday of that week featured a double-bill of fabulous new public libraries. In the morning we visited Woollahra Library at Double Bay, and in the afternoon the City of Sydney’s Green Square Library. Both are wonderful, innovative spaces, run by passionate librarians.
As impressive as these spaces are, I was left with a nagging doubt. I had just arrived in Australia from the UK, where I had spent the previous ten years watching the public library service being decimated by ever more violent funding cuts. The city in which I lived and worked – Sheffield – had seen libraries handed over to volunteers to run, while in many other places library branches were simply shut. New flagship libraries, such as the Library of Birmingham, had faced devastating cuts to operating budgets. In this context, seeing Sydney’s sparkling new libraries was inspiring, but also worrying. How sustainable are these developments?
At Green Square and Double Bay that day I asked librarians whether they had any concerns about their funding in years to come. The librarians were typically optimistic – they felt that the contributions their buildings and services made to communities were sufficiently valued, and embedded in longer-term city planning. But there clearly are concerns. The Renew our Libraries campaign, for example, has been successful in its goal to increase the level state funding for libraries in NSW, and is now campaigning to protect those funding increases.
This has led us to begin work a research project that will investigate public library infrastructure development in Asutralia. It will explore the purpose of the new libraries like Double Bay and Green Square, the processes that underpin their development, the funding models used to finance them, and the extent to which PL infrastructure developments are integrated with broader cultural/creative city strategies.
