Historical background

Australia was relatively late in implementing the idea of a completely free public library. Institutes such as subscription and mechanic’s libraries, discarded in the late nineteenth century in the United States and the United Kingdom, were still being used (and in some cases subsidized by state governments) in Australia in the 1980s (Bundy, 2010). From this inauspicious beginning, the Australian public library system has come a very long way but still has room to improve.

It was in the mid-1930s that a seismic shift took place in the landscape of Australian public libraries. In 1935 the landmark Munn-Pitt report was issued. Commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ralph Munn and Earnest Pitt surveyed public libraries nationwide in Australia in an effort to determine what steps should be taken in order to establish a robust public library system. The result was a report whose effect was so seismic that library historians in Australia often refer to the periods before and after the Munn-Pitt report as AM and PM, or ante-Munn and post- Munn (Amey, 2001).

The report had such a large impact not only because of the ideas it espoused, but because Ralph Munn was an exceptionally good writer and the report was littered with quotes like ‘Anybody who wishes to take away a favourable impression of their city’s State Library should not make the mistake of entering it’. One summary judgment of the report was that ‘As a whole, Australia was better provided with local libraries in 1880 than it is today’. These quotes could not help but find their way into newspapers, where they generated a significant amount of publicity. The report went on to cite specific examples in specific libraries of shortcomings, which encouraged local newspapers to hold up their own local libraries to comparison and scrutiny. The final report, which was finished at the end of 1934, was withheld from publication until January 26, 1935 in an extremely canny display of public relations work. This time of year in Australia immediately follows the typical post- Christmas vacation, when news is particularly slow. It is also Australia Day, when ‘editors are pressured to find hard news to balance the piety of conventional copy run on the annual holiday’. Would that all public librarians could be so PR savvy (Amey, 2001).

Librarians generally agreed with the report’s findings. During the interim period when the report was complete but before it was published the principal librarian of the Public Library of New South Wales, W.H. Ifould, led a campaign to convince his fellow state librarians to issue statements on the report in order to drum up publicity. A statement by Ifould and his colleagues eventually agreed with Munn-Pitt that ‘the existing country and suburban institutes and schools of arts are inadequate and the system unsuitable … From the point of view of education, over 90 percent are practically useless’. They went on to state their opinion that the current policy of the Australian state governments towards public library was not only anemic but shortsighted, and they recommended that free, truly public libraries be established in every Australian town with a population of over 10,000 (Jones, 1995).

The Free Library Movement was founded in 1935 with the cause of advancing Ifould’s ideas. The chief player in the movement was Geoffrey Cochrane Remington, a Sydney lawyer by profession. Like many others, Remington was startled into action by the contents of the Munn-Pitt report and was a tireless campaigner. He spearheaded a radio campaign in the late 1930s, writing copy for various local activists to read out. He kept up a vast amount of correspondence. He traveled widely by rail to various parts of Australia, a very time consuming business. An exceptionally effective consensus builder, Remington even succeeded in convincing the Anglican and Catholic Archbishops of Brisbane to appear together during the inauguration of a library branch in Queensland, this apparently being the first time the two had appeared on the same platform. His tireless efforts and his innate ability to convince people of his cause lead one newspaper to flatly state that ‘nobody dodges Remington’. Thanks to advocates like Remington, within a few years of the Munn-Pitt report most states had adopted public library legislation (Maguire, 2007).

Current framework

These pieces of legislation, as enacted, make public libraries in Australia a partnership between state and local authorities. States provide a small amount of funding, but the ratio of state to local funding has decreased sharply and is now not significant, even as library use has steadily increased. Currently, 12 million Australians, or about 60 percent of the population, are library users. In some areas of Australia, 80 percent of the population uses the library, putting these areas on par with Finland for having the population with the highest percentage of library users. Public libraries are the most heavily used public buildings in Australia, seeing more than 100 million visitors each year. Ninety percent of Australians think libraries should be publicly funded. However, despite this overwhelming evidence that the Australian populace uses and values its public libraries, total funding for public libraries in Australia (by both state and local governments) amounted to $880 million per year in 2008–09 (the latest year for which data is available), or approximately the budget of a single large educational institution in Australia. This breaks down to about seven cents per Australian per day (Bundy, 2010). This is approximately one-third of the accepted international best practice for library funding (Bundy, 2009). If the original ratio of state-local funding were still in use today, public libraries could count on receiving approximately $1.6 billion. State governments now contribute approximately 15 percent of funding to public libraries, with local governments providing the remaining 85 percent (Bundy, 2011).

Total funding for public libraries in Australia could be dramatically improved. They receive ‘by far’ the lowest per capita funding of any ‘educational, cultural or civic provision’, even while they are the most heavily used of these institutions. It is also estimated that for every dollar invested, public libraries in Australia deliver a benefit worth between five and six dollars. If total funding were raised to the level of international best practice mentioned above, it would total $2.6 billion (in Australian dollars) for a return on investment of $14 billion (Bundy, 2009; Goodman, 2008).

Funding in Australia’s public library system has reached the point where many libraries, like those of China, feel the need to seek outside sources of funding to accomplish initiatives that are outside the scope of traditional library services. For example, in order to implement its ‘yourtutor’ online homework tutoring service, the Fairfield City Library Service partnered with Tutoring Australasia, a for-profit company, wrote a grant that was funded by the New South Wales Community Development Expenditure Scheme, which is itself funded from a portion of the profits from poker machines. The Mornington Peninsula Hastings Library was able to start a program called Babies Love Books Too with a grant of $20,000, which carried the program through its first five years and was extremely successful. Even after a successful grant period however, tax-supported funding was not made available and the library had to turn to funding from the two largest local employers, a pair of quarries, for funds. After seven total years of running a successful program, the library was finally able to pick up the funding (Goodman, 2008). While the efforts of these libraries and their partners are truly commendable, one wonders about the fate of programs or ideas that are not fortunate enough to find such sponsors.

Legislation and legal structure

The administrative structure of public libraries in Australia differs from state to state, and within states. For example, libraries in New South Wales can either be operated by a single, standalone government authority or they can be regional libraries where up to eight local councils operate the library jointly. Either way, they are highly localized. By contrast, the Northern Territory operates a single, 32-branch library system (called the Public Library of the Northern Territory, or PLNT) with libraries that serve populations ranging from 73,800 to 200. Funding for the PLNT comes directly from the Northern Territory Government. In South Australia, local governments partner with the Department of Education and Children’s Services to provide School Community Libraries. In Western Australia, local governments finance library buildings, staff, and operating costs, while the state government pays for collections and processing for the 232 public libraries in the district (Australian Public Libraries Statistical Report, 2010). New South Wales, Queensland, and Western Australia maintain sets of service standards for libraries that operate within their boundaries, which can be found here: http://www.alia.org.au/governance/committees/public.libraries/standards.html.

Public libraries in Australia benefit from the existence of Public Libraries Australia (PLA), Friends of Libraries Australia (FOLA), and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). These three groups each provide major assistance to the cause of public librarianship in Australia. PLA and FOLA are primarily advocacy groups. PLA plays the same advocacy role as the American Library Association (ALA) in the United States and acts as a ‘peak body’ that ‘represent[s], advocate[s] for and support[s] the interests of Australia’s public libraries’. Their strategic plan (available at their home page, http://www.pla.org.au) calls for them to advocate mostly at the federal level and to contribute to professional development activities. ALIA is the professional organization of librarians in Australia, and it too advocates on a national level, but mostly focuses on professional development. FOLA is also an advocacy group but concentrates its efforts at the grass-roots level, serving as a national clearinghouse for local friends of the library groups. However, they also act on the national stage, as they did in 2008 when they published an open letter to the newly elected federal government calling for increased federal attention to Australia’s public libraries. In this letter, they called for the development of an ‘Australian Public Libraries Strategic Framework’ (McEntyre et al., 2008).

Certain states are also more fortunate than others in their leadership. For example, in 2002 the Municipal Association of Victoria formed the Ministerial Advisory Council on Public Libraries, which existed to advocate on behalf of public libraries to the Minister of Local Government. It established a vision for the future of public libraries in Australia, developed key policy initiatives for public libraries and the government, and in general played an advocacy roll for public libraries in Victoria (Ministerial Advisory Council on Public Libraries, 2007). Unfortunately, it was disbanded in 2010 ‘pending approval from the Victorian government’, although promises have been made to resurrect it (Municipal Association of Victoria, 2011a). Another keen (and ongoing) project of the Victorian government is the Swift Library Consortium, a partnership between the Municipal Association of Victoria and the Public Library Victoria Network. The Swift Library Consortium is a shared catalog and cooperative lending arrangement between 22 public libraries (Municipal Association of Victoria, 2011c). The Ministerial Association of Victoria was even able, with the help of other advocates, to reverse the government of Victoria’s announcement that funding for public libraries would be cut by an amount ranging from $5.7 million to $7.1 million over four years (Municipal Association of Victoria, 2011b). Funding was not only restored to libraries, but $200,000 in ‘top up’ payments was re-established by the Ministerial Advisory Council, and $100,000 was set aside to fund a statewide survey of public libraries in Victoria (‘$6.5 m for libraries and landmark library review’, 2011).

Overall, however, Australian public libraries appear to be somewhat of a mixed bag. Funding has increased over the last five years, from $694 million to $882 million. However, this has not translated into similar gains in all other categories. For example, total circulation began the same five year period at 176,409,857 before peaking at 182,934,975 in 2006–07, falling to 177,428,161 the following year, and climbing back to 182,640,004 in 2008–09. Patron visits follow the same pattern, peaking in 2006–07 at 111,738,333 before falling off slightly and not completely rebounding. Oddly, the total expenditure on library materials has increased from $99 million to $117 million even while total number of items in the collections has remained static, and the number of items per capita has dropped slightly. One indicator that has shown steady growth in all of the last five years is the number of Internet terminals available in Australia’s public libraries. They have increased from 5,965 such terminals in 2004–05 to 8,652 in 2008–09, which is enough to bump the number of Internet terminals in the country per capita from 3 to 4 (Australian public libraries statistical report 2008–2009, 2010).

Conclusion

From an inauspicious beginning, Australia’s public library system has blossomed into a perfectly respectable, although massively underfunded, network of institutions. After leaving the outmoded subscription model of library service behind (hopefully for good, although there has been discussion in Australia of instituting user fees for specific aspects of library service), Australia has been able to assemble a nationwide system of true public libraries on a state-by-state basis. Doing so without an overarching national policy is a true achievement, one that other countries that leave public libraries up to individual states, such as South Africa and India, have not been able to accomplish as fully as Australia. However, while Australia has seen its public library funding increase steadily since 2006, this burden has been almost entirely on units of local government. State governments have fallen short financially. If the states were to live up to their end of the bargain, Australia’s public library system could conceivably be one of the best in the world. A national agenda for the development of public libraries in Australia, with a mandate that holds state governments to their funding commitments, would be a monumental achievement.

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