Landfall editor Lynley Edmeades, associate professor Peter Simpson, David Kārena-Holmes, and Carolyn McCurdie from Octagon Poetry Collective. The anthology includes “poems of outrage, essays of research and political outcries”, which were compiled in response to the ongoing activity at the National Library. Earlier this month the library announced it would donate about 600,000 of the books it planned to cull from its overseas collection to the Internet Archive, a digital library with the stated mission of universal access to all knowledge. It will make digital copies of the works freely available online. The move will free up space for the National Library to store more New Zealand and Pasifika works.
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National Librarian Rachel Esson says the agreement is a great outcome, and means the books will not be destroyed. About 50,000 books in the Overseas Published Collection have already been culled to free up space for New Zealand material in the library’s burgeoning storage facilities. Those books were given to libraries and other institutions, including a Lions Club, which sold many at a book fair. Excess books from the fair were passed on to booksellers, Esson said. While libraries have requested a further 10,000 books slated for de-listing, the rest would be physically shipped to America for long-term storage, via a digitisation facility in the Philippines.
by Christine Dann
The National Librarian Rachel Esson told us at the end of last month: “We are now in advanced discussions with an overseas digitisation partner.”
In her OPC [Overseas Published Collection] Update on 28 June, she went on to say it was her view that “…digitisation will safeguard New Zealanders’ access to the titles from the OPC now and in the future.”
This strikes Book Guardians Aotearoa (BGA) as a weird thing to say, when clearly New Zealanders’ access to the books they paid for has been safeguarded ever since the creation of the National Library by keeping them on shelves, in New Zealand. But things were to get even weirder…
by Christine Dann
If you had been given permission to explore Wellington’s Parliamentary Library on a weekday afternoon in 1907, you might have been very surprised to see – among the staff and other users in jackets and ties – a teenage girl settled comfortably in a corner, with a stack of books close to hand. If you came at closing time, you might even have overheard her father (a friend of the Chief Librarian, as well as Premier Richard John Seddon) say “Come on, Kathleen, it’s time to go home now.”
It was only because her father (the wealthy businessman Harold Beauchamp) was so well-connected that Kathleen had access to the library, but no one could complain that she did not make made good use of her precious after-school time there. According to the Parliamentary webpage on her activities there: