On Being Seen and Heard (or not) at St Heliers

Browsing at St Heliers Public Library.

If we’re to believe the letters column of our daily newspaper in the last few days, reading is simply not possible in the St Heliers Public Library. It’s as much as any local resident can bear to dash in, pick a book (any book) and dash out again before the noise pollution on the premises offends their sensibilities, not to mention their ears. Many of the polluters are children, who insist on being heard as well as seen. 

The writers to the New Zealand Herald seem to yearn for the Good Old Days of public libraries. Back then, stern, fusty staff shushed everyone and the only sounds from patrons were those of pages turning (not of pins dropping, as the library was no place for sharp objects). 

Just imagine how they — letter-writers and/or the librarians of the G.O.D. — would have responded had they been at the Auckland Central Library a week ago when a performing duo, the Dresden Dolls, presented their “ninja gig”: at that event the punk cabaret artists succeeded in persuading some 300 people in the audience to chant “F– it” in unison.

The Butchers, the Bakers...
Ah, the Good Old Days. St Heliers must have been a quieter place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Groups of Auckland citizenry including butchers and bakers (sadly no candlestick makers, though there was at least one temperance group) would catch the ferry there for picnics and other excursions, walking the quarter-mile down the wharf to get to the beach. Tamaki Drive did not exist, though there was a Tamaki Road Board, the local (very local) equivalent of today’s Auckland Council.

This outlying area had a library but it wasn’t especially public. In the absence of a suitable building, its books were in the custody of the local fire brigade, in premises where the present St Heliers library stands. Apparently the firemen enjoyed reading the books, which local residents had donated and the board had supplemented. But peace and quiet? Not likely, given the clanging of bells and everything else that accompanies emergencies of an incendiary nature. 

The St Heliers Public Library building was initially
the seat of local government, and its lamps
bear the initials of the Tamaki Road Board.

Today’s library was built in 1926 to a design by Grierson, Aimer and Draffin (better known as the architects of the Auckland War Memorial Museum). This brick building was the road board headquarters — the initials on the lamps out the front offer a clue to that  — as well as home to the fire brigade. It was fully converted to its present use in 1931 when St Heliers became part of Auckland.

The amalgamation may not have had an entirely positive influence on the area; even in the G.O.D., Auckland’s own central city library wasn’t always quiet, as an 1890 letter to the Auckland Star attested. “A Ratepayer” noted that “the noise of the draughts players in the reading-room is very annoying, and I would suggest a separate room, or that they should be entirely done away with.”

Has it occurred to anyone that if there’s a problem with libraries, it may be space rather than noise? Even in its the 1940s, according to Wynne Colgan in The Governor’s Gift, users of the St Heliers branch sometimes had to queue in the street just to get inside. Over the decades it has undergone several extensions including, most recently, an ingenious and all-but-invisible one that moves the essential “back office” upstairs. However, this suburban library is still small. I doubt there’s enough space to add a “quiet room” like those I’ve seen at the Mt Wellington and Botany Downs public libraries. It’s also very busy, with a thousand or so visitors a day. 

Xena, as portrayed by Bunny Elwell
at the St Heliers Public Library.

Xena the Library Cat
One such visitor, a senior citizen, seems unfazed by it all, and perhaps some of today’s complaining ratepayers could take a leaf out of her book. Xena the library cat has a home of her own but gets lonely when her human indulges in a bad habit of going to work. So this beautiful tortoiseshell, who is 15 now (a septuagenarian, in human terms), strolls two kilometres down to the library every day. She has also been known to call in at the nearby fish and chip shop.

Xena is popular with locals and has become a focus for the branch, with her portrait by staff member Bunny Elwell now on the wall. The St Heliers Public Library has held a contest for children to paint their own portraits of her, has run Facebook classes for senior citizens using Xena’s own Facebook page as a learning tool and, late last year, presented her with a rug made from squares knitted at library knit-in events.

YouTube shows this cool cat waiting outside the library and she even has her own Twitter account, where her profile reads: “You can usually find me lounging around in the Large Print area of St Heliers Library in Auckland. My interests are eating, sleeping and extreme road crossing.”

“Summer Reading
Adventure” notice.

Xena wasn’t in attendance the afternoon I visited this library. In fact, the place was pretty quiet — just how some people like it. There was evidence of children in the form of a half-eaten lollipop on the step, a pink scooter propped against the wall (near the “no bicycles” sign), and a noticeboard promoting the Auckland Libraries’ “Summer Reading Adventure”, but otherwise the juvenile form of Homo sapiens was little seen, and certainly not heard.

The computers, unusually for most libraries I’ve visited, had no child users at all that Sunday afternoon. Nobody spoke loudly on their cellphone, another complaint of the “shush” brigade, and one with which I can sympathise — though I don’t think it’s especially a library problem. I saw for myself, too, that several adults were reading books without difficulty. Good on them.

Adults seen reading in the
St Heliers Public Library.

Sources

See the links in the post above, also:

Jackson, Elizabeth T, Delving into the Past of Auckland’s Eastern Suburbs: Section 6 — St. Heliers Bay;

 Verran, David, Auckland City Libraries: Another Chapter.

St Heliers Bay peace and quiet.

Elsewhere, Anywhere and Right Here: The Many Locations of a Public Library

Eaton’s catalogue, possibly not where libraries
source their supplies. This is at the heritage
room, downtown Edmonton Public Library.

Public libraries open doors to Elsewhere yet, in a way, many libraries could almost be Anywhere. Perhaps they furnish themselves from the same global sales catalogue, right down to their human fixtures, such as the habitual sleepers, the old guys who read the newspapers, and the tourists.

Members of this last group are found at downtown libraries, which perhaps they enter with eyes only for the internet. Tourists are not at the library to see landmarks or cultural artifacts, the stuff they’d do at museums and galleries: they generally wish to sit in comfort and quiet, if never very Far From the Madding Crowd, and attend to email, Facebook or YouTube, making themselves at home. Ironically, in so doing, they contribute further to downtown libraries’ ambience of both Elsewhere (exotica!) and Anywhere (universality). 

A Long Way from Anywhere
A long way from Anywhere and twice as far from Elsewhere is another location that a public library is concerned with: Right Here. Yes, a good public library tells us about the place it’s in, as well as the places it’s not — but to hear and see this, we may need to linger and poke about a bit. 

It’s not always as immediate and obvious as the English–Maori signs we have in some Auckland public libraries. It took me quite some digging to discover, for instance, that custom-made floor coverings in our Glen Eden and Massey branches represent their areas in artistic ways.

Sometimes, though, it’s easier to notice what’s “local” in a library when you’re new to the country, a complete stranger rather than a slightly straying citizen. In Canada late last year, I had the opportunity to be that stranger. 

On Being a Stranger in Someone Else’s Country
In the month I visited, I managed to learn about the place not just by walking the streets and taking public transport but also by using public libraries — with help, as friends showed me around and borrowed books that I went on to read. Thanks to Canadian libraries and my local guides, I:  

Light Lifting is available at Auckland Libraries,
as is the Canadian Railroad Trilogy picturebook.

...  Joined in a bookclub discussion at Woodcroft branch library, Edmonton, that inspired me to read Light Lifting, the wonderful first book of stories by Alexander MacLeod. (Note to self: must also read his famous father Alistair, eg No Great Mischief.)
 
...  Listened to Gordon Lightfoot’s iconic folksong, ‘Canadian Railroad Trilogy’, while looking at the thoughtful, multi-layered illustrations in the picturebook by artist Ian Wallace. (If you borrow this, be sure to read the Illustrator’s Notes tucked away at the back.)
 
...  Got lost in but enthralled by RED whose author and artist, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, is described as “the father of Haida Manga”. I know little of either Haida, an Indian tribe from the Pacific Coast of Canada, or Manga, the Japanese comic-book genre, so perhaps my quaint lostness is not surprising. Now I want to know more of both. (Does Aotearoa/New Zealand have Maori Manga? I am yet to find out.) Two other books by Yahgulanaas are in Auckland Libraries.

A little bit of Rome at Library Square, Vancouver.
(So is this library a round peg in a square hole?)

...  Took away a treasure trove of reading lists and research pointers from the downtown Vancouver Public Library. On the outside, this facility bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Colosseum in Rome — now what does that say about libraries opening doors to Elsewhere? Inside, however, the many resources include VPL brochures on such local topics as the fur trade, Chinese–Canadian history, fiction from British Columbia, First Nations traditions, hiking trails, and a self-guided tour of the library itself. (You can even get married there!)

...  Discovered, thanks to the downtown Edmonton Public Library’s heritage room, the importance of the Eaton’s catalogue, porcupine quill decoration and jars or bottles in Canadian life. This makes me wonder just what might catch the eye of New Zealand newcomers who browse the heritage collections of Auckland’s four central libraries — Manukau Central, Auckland Central, Waitakere Central and Takapuna.

Books from the heritage room,
downtown Edmonton Public Library.

Becoming an Armchair Traveller
My quest to know more about the big country north of the 49th parallel continued as I travelled back south and settled into antipodean life again. On the plane I read publishing impresario Doug Gibson’s Stories about Storytellers, a fascinating new memoir of his career extracting books from such famous Canadians as Pierre Trudeau and Alice Munro. I’m glad I bought a copy when I heard him speak at Edmonton’s LitFest (celebrating non-fiction), as Auckland Libraries doesn’t have it yet. 

In its capacity as doorperson to Elsewhere, I think Auckland Libraries has otherwise been faithful in carrying out its responsibilities to Canadian lit and learning. Back home I reserved and have since read Half-Blood Blues, Ghanaian Calgarian Esi Edugyan’s second novel. I’d heard her at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival where, despite what I took to be her Canadian quietness, she really impressed. The novel, which secured a Booker shortlisting and won Canada’s coveted Giller Prize, is about an elderly black musician looking back at his days in the jazz age. (I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you get the Serpent’s Tail edition, don’t read the back-cover blurb or the teaser on the front: they tell a little too much.)

A page out of Emily’s book, Growing
Pains, shows her humorous Self-Portrait
with Friends. This copy’s first home was
Leys Institute Library, Ponsonby.

Courtesy of Auckland Libraries again, I’ve pursued an interest born in Vancouver where I discovered the Canadian artist Emily Carr (though I wasn’t the first). This contemporary of our own Frances Hodgkins persevered, like Hodgkins, in adverse circumstances, and became a national icon — posthumously (which is too often the way).

Emily’s in the Basement
Carr is known for her story-telling as well as her painting, and among numerous buried treasures in the Auckland Central Library’s basement is a first edition (1946) of her autobiography, Growing Pains. This volume is in remarkable shape given its 60-plus years of knocking around public libraries, and it is a beautiful thing. I recommend taking a look once you know a bit about Carr. Though the writing is dated, it is very readable and its author has, unsurprisingly, a good eye for the colours and textures of language.

Her struggles to be accepted as an artist in her home country, and as a woman alone, seem to mirror those of Hodgkins. Carr also studied under Hodgkins in Concarneau, France — though sadly the autobiography doesn’t name this “fine water colourist”, whom she describes as Australian! 

Public library entrance
sign in St Paul, a small
town in Alberta’s prairies.

Clearly, my Canadian Studies can continue, with Auckland Libraries assisting. Porcupines, old barns, the dinosaurs of Drumheller... these are part of the Canadiana clamouring for my attention, and my presence Elsewhere seems to place no great limitation on distance learning.

It’s the middle of winter now in the north, however, so I’m particularly pleased to say the next stop in my Latitude of Libraries tour is Right Here at home, in St Heliers. Summer at a library by the sea — who could ask for more?

Hard Bittern: A Tale of Manurewa

Bing Dawe’s Australasian bittern weathervane, shown at Auckland
Botanic Gardens in Manurewa,is part of his Watching out for
St Francis series at the Sculpture in the Gardens exhibition.
Photo courtesy of Jane Sanders, ART Agent.

Manurewa means “soaring bird” to people whose appreciation of Maori language involves translating it into English. To others it means “drifting kite”. Birds and kites both feature in old stories about this part of South Auckland.

In the 1930s a Pakeha ethnographer and collector, George Graham, recounted “Nga Matukurua — The Two Bitterns” before an audience at the Auckland Museum’s Anthropological Section. This “Tale of Manurewa” was about twin pre-European pa, fortified villages on two neighbouring volcanic mounds. 

During Pakeha settlement these became known as McLaughlin’s and Wiri mountains but now they are known hardly at all, as my kind has spent decades erasing them. McLaughlin’s, about 10km from the Manurewa town centre, strikes me as a misplaced Mayan construction covered in grass, though in an Auckland Libraries anthology, poet Tony Beyer sees it as a temple from ancient Mesopotamia:

mclaughlin’s gashed hill
tiered into a ziggurat
by quarryings

Scoria from Wiri Mountain made railway ballast “all the way south to Ohakune”, according to Volcanoes of Auckland. This one-time landmark has kept only its lower northern slopes, incorporating “the best lava cave in New Zealand” plus, where a 60-metre-high scoria cone once stood, “a large lake-filled hole”. The authors have low expectations of its future, predicting it will be “flattened and earmarked for industrial subdivision”.

The Vigilant and the Careless
But let’s get back to the bitterns Graham mentioned. The Te Wai o Hua people’s hill-fort commanders in the late seventeenth century were dubbed Te Matukutureia and Te Matukutururu, respectively the vigilant bittern and the careless one. The careless bittern lost his head and consequently his life when Ngati Whatua warriors captured his pa — his fault, as when war threatened he had gone fishing for eels and fallen asleep (the local equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns). His kinsman on the other hill kept “his sentries ever posted, his pa entrance ways securely closed”, saving his village, his people and “his tatooed head”.

The chiefs’ avian identities settled on the hills: McLaughlin’s Mountain is more eloquently Matukutureia, and its careless neighbour Matukutururu. (That’s according to Manukau’s Journey, an Auckland Libraries e-resource, but some people apply these names the other way around.) 

At the botanic gardens, Manurewa.

These days The Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand describes the Australasian bittern as a “Protected rare native... Usually solitary and stealthy”. Its favourite hideout is a swamp (or wetland, as we call these shrinking habitats now), but the matuku does fly. The noted artist and ornithologist Don Binney painted one soaring through the sky at Te Henga, West Auckland. In Manurewa, the popular Auckland Botanic Gardens currently feature Bing Dawe’s flying bittern at their Sculpture in the Gardens exhibition, on until February.

An Appropriate Emblem?
Could the bittern be an appropriate emblem for Manurewa today? It’s a suspicious bird (says William Herbert Guthrie-Smith in Bird Life on Island and Shore), and has reason to be: it’s embattled. So is Manurewa, if media portrayals are accurate — a suburb full of streets named Struggle, inhabited by Kiwi battlers.* Stories that have made the news and elicited wider comment are about the murder of a liquor store owner, attacks in bars, the Manurewa Cosmopolitan Club’s refusal to admit a turban-wearing Sikh man, residents’ opposition to a planned prison for men next to the existing women’s facility, concern about state house tenants “let in” to Manurewa, and a suspected drunk driver whose car critically injured two girls on the footpath. 

Doug Ford’s Manurewa murals include this tongue-in-cheek
(he says) portrayal of the fictitious Oh My God Fruitery.

When Manurewa lost South Auckland’s central business district to another ward last year, a councillor said the change “ripped the economic heart of the Manurewa ward”. The Auckland Council’s Manurewa board suggests in its just-published plan that the pre-amalgamation council “failed to show [the] urgency necessary to transform the Manurewa town centre”, a smaller set of shops and services than those in the central business district nearby. 

Earlier in the year, it was high noon in Manurewa for six whole weeks, with both hands of the town clock stopped on 12.  Auckland bureaucrats were held responsible for time standing still.

But the local business association has worked to spruce things up, commissioning mural artist Doug Ford to paint the town. Manurewa is also a semi-finalist for the 2012 national “Community of the Year” Award.

There have been moments of glory, several of them thanks to a man who is now a stern-looking businessman with spectacles and silvering hair. John Walker, a member of the Manurewa Harriers Club in his teens, started running seriously in the early 1970s and didn’t stop until he had completed 135 sub-four-minute miles, 20 years later. Sir John Walker represents Manurewa–Papakura on the council and chairs his Find Your Field of Dreams Foundation, helping South Auckland youth through sport.

Local MP and Prime Minister Bill Massey
unveiled the Manurewa war memorial in 1921.

Other Manurewa moments, commemorated rather than celebrated, came in wars fought elsewhere. An obelisk on the corner of Hill and Great South roads lists First World War fields of battle and locals who died there. This 1921 monument just outside the gates of Manurewa Central School, supplemented by more recent plaques, is reminiscent of war memorials in small towns all over New Zealand.

A Microcosm of the Community
The public library, 30 years old in 2012, is across the road on land that local historian Gwen Wichman says was once the school horse paddock. When we arrived on a Saturday morning, a Chinese woman and her grandchildren were just leaving with a fresh supply of books. We found many more children and teenagers inside, mirroring perhaps the high proportion of young people in Manurewa’s population (29 per cent are younger than 15 years, compared with 22 per cent Auckland-wide).



In one library nook, a pair of jandalled teens at either side of a small table flirted in a manner recognisable from a distance and probably across the millennia, pretending attention to their respective magazine selections while rather more interested in each other. At the far wall, a couple of pony-tailed girls watched over the shoulder of a classmate/brother/boyfriend as he watched something riveting on a computer screen.

Boy and book, Manurewa Public Library

Children of assorted ages engaged in activities communal and solitary at another table. By the bookshelves a small girl clad confidently in fuchsia colours of magenta and pink tried to converse with her browsing father (she’d already chosen her reading). A sneakered boy, cross-legged on the floor, was absorbed in the ROAARR! of the picturebook before him.

All these people seemed to reflect the ethnic diversity of the Manurewa board area, where Maori and Pacific residents are 57 per cent of the population, and Asian people 15 per cent. The library caters for its community with Hindi and Punjabi collections as well as substantial Maori and Pasefika sections.

The low-roofed library building has a warm, woody atmosphere inside, thanks to sloping ceiling beams, brightly coloured signs and a vibrant mural by Kaiaua artist Tony Johnston. None of South Auckland’s “troubles” was evident when we were there; nor did anything appear to warrant the two — no, three — security officers we saw. They were sociable as well as vigilant, however. 

Above and below: Manurewa Public Library, outside and in.

 I chose two children’s books, Jan Mark’s Museum Book and Keri Smith’s How to Be an Explorer of the World, which I’ve wanted to read ever since it featured in Auckland Libraries’ Top 5 Goodies blog. Carol’s haul included a huge volume featuring photos by Annie Leibovitz. She also indulged her love of English poetry that has regular rhythm and end-of-line rhyme.

The Drifting Kite
However, I wanted to know more about the “drifting kite” of Manurewa. Though the library’s copy of Tamaki-Makaurau: Myths and Legends of Auckland Landmarks doesn’t include that story, the Auckland Museum Library and the South Auckland Research Centre (at Manukau Public Library) both have something that does, George Graham’s “Two Bitterns” lecture.

As well as explaining the Matukurua villages’ names, Graham told of a rivalry there between the brothers Tamapahore and Tamapahure. When Tamapahore’s kite flew better than Tamapahure’s, an incantation by the latter caused Tamapahore’s kite to drift away “to the far off Hauraki horizon”, its owner in pursuit. Manurewa’s full name is therefore “Te Manu-rewa-o-Tamapahore” — the drifted-away kite of Tamapahore.

So is Manurewa soaring bird or drifting kite? The local marae and schools seem to favour the latter but I get the feeling many Pakeha (not Graham) prefer the former. The soaring bird suggests a near-empty landscape, with nothing between us and nature; the kite indicates that people have lived and travelled around the area since long before the Pakeha arrived. 

Manurewa library activities communal and solitary,
literary and otherwise.

* The Oxford English Dictionary, available online for Auckland Libraries members, describes a “battler” as “a swagman” and “a word used in Australia and New Zealand in various other shades of meaning... esp. a person struggling against odds.”

The opening lines from Tony Beyer’s poem “Matukutururu” are copyright and quoted here with his permission. The poem previously appeared in his collection The Century (HeadworX, 1998).

Manurewa population statistics in this post come from the local board plan. 

A typed transcript of the George Graham lecture is at Auckland Museum Library, with a copy at the South Auckland Research Centre.

Another source for this post was Manukau’s Journey, the Auckland Libraries timeline of South Auckland history researched and published by the South Auckland Research Centre, now at Manukau Library.

The Reader, the Library and the Lens

Man reading, Vancouver Public Library downtown,
October 2011.

The man in this picture: what’s his story?

Of various photographs I’ve taken that show people reading in libraries, this one draws my attention the most. The man in the picture is not the first ever to be absorbed in a book. But his hands are almost clasped (in supplication, stress?), and the title of the book that tops the small selection next to him, Mass Destruction, is striking. The photo has him close up — although he’s half around a corner, facing away, there’s a sense of intimacy.

A public library is a public place. Photographic design (angle, distance) or accident (blurring) means few people are positively identifiable. And being seen reading or in almost any other library activity is not incriminating, nor anything to be ashamed of. So I keep using the camera. 

There is an ethical question, however: if people don’t know they’re being photographed or consent to it, am I crossing a boundary, taking something more than just a photo? (I’m not the only person who wrestles with ethical issues in this setting. The history of public libraries is full of books whose presence on the shelves has been challenged by outraged citizens or staff, and full of debates over intellectual freedom and privacy — particularly since the USA Patriot Act.)

A comment by the New Zealand writer Fiona Farrell makes me think that even the observed reader maintains his privacy, has a room of (and on) his own. “It is always so difficult to tell what is going on in a reader’s mind,” she writes in The Broken Book. “...The reader could at one remove be experiencing the thrill of illicit passion or considering bloody rebellion. No wonder the dictators and leaders of cults burn books and issue their edicts of forbidden texts.”

Carol reading, East Coast
Bays Public Library, Auckland.

Some things my lens doesn’t penetrate. I’ll never know the story, the one belonging to the young man at the Vancouver downtown library that day. I’ll never know what he’s reading or get inside his head; neither will anyone else who looks at that picture. And that’s the way it should be.

* * *

Farrell’s Broken Book set out to be prose about walking — it was to be this New Zealand author’s first work of non-fiction — but after the Canterbury earth quaked, the writing went in other directions as well: across shaky ground and into poetry. This is no great surprise for those of us who read her; it is a pleasure. I think many people like the way her writing refuses to confine itself. Very recently my bookclub loved this new book, and it features on all the “best of the year” lists I’ve seen so far.

During one section, “A Walk to the Botanic Gardens” (in the Oamaru of her childhood, perhaps?), Farrell finds herself in the Cork City Library, Ireland. There she talks of being “supposed to be writing a novel” but becoming distracted by old Irish texts, among which she discovers the old woman of Beare. (Thereby hangs a tale. That senior citizen is not one of the more bedraggled, down-and-out library patrons; she’s the narrator in a long and very old poem.) I especially like what Farrell then says about the library at Cork —

The reading room is filled with the sort of people you find in reading rooms everywhere: in winter, the old guys who sit on the streets in summer come in to read the papers out of the chill wind. There are school kids doing their projects and giggling surreptitiously behind the shelving. There are the natives of a dozen different countries dealing with officialdom on the library computers.

Above: newspaper stand, Edmonton Public Library downtown.
Below, two photos of browsers, Vancouver Public Library downtown.

Yes, that’s a picture you could paint from a library in Auckland, New Zealand, too. And during October when I was in Canada, it was similar. At the Edmonton Public Library downtown branch, I smiled to see old codgers reading the paper just as the old codgers do in the libraries of my latitude. I wouldn’t like to suggest that the men in my photo had come in from the cold — it was only autumn after all, with temperatures not yet in the minuses — but I understand that this EPL branch and indoor shopping centres downtown are great places of refuge when winter gets really miserable, such as more than twenty below. 

 

Finally, I love Farrell’s comment about being a library browser: “I was there in the warm, browsing the shelves. I like that word, ‘browsing’. Like a cow picking its way from one delicious clump of clover to another. It’s a drifty word, full of purposeless pleasure.”

Yes, yes. (I’ve got the photos to prove it.) Thank you, Fiona Farrell, for putting all this into words.

The Broken Book by Fiona Farrell is published by Auckland University Press, 2011. It is copyright, and quoted here with permission. The photos in this post are the blogger’s own.

  

Glen Eden Public Library, Auckland.

Parent and child in pink gumboots, Massey Public Library, Auckland.

Shoes off, feet up, Edmonton downtown library.

Navigational Aides: Auckland + Edmonton + Elsewhere

A member of the public, equipped for all terrain, uses a
check-out machine at Edmonton’s downtown library.

“Our professionally trained staff take you beyond Google with the knowledge, discernment and desire to help you navigate a universe of information.” 

To an e-(lectronic), i-(nternet) and info-junkie like me, that’s the ultimate: the best I could wish for. The Edmonton Public Library must think so, too, because that sentence features in many of its media releases, including one that trumpets the 17-library system’s win of North America’s biggest library PR award. This Canadian institution has made people sit up and take notice in places other than Libraryland, too, with its 2010 rebranding and “guerilla marketing” campaign winning eight diverse other awards.

Spreading the Words  

Messages such as “We make geek chic”, “Market stats. City maps”, “Beyoncé’s latest. Beethoven’s greatest”, “We share stories” and the all-encompassing “Spread the words” feature on posters, carry-bags and other merchandise, showing the library has gone all out to be up with the play, down with the brown, the new black (but in this decade’s version of technicolour).

Billboard on Edmonton Public Library building, downtown.

Does the public library achieve all those things? Does it help me navigate a universe of information? Here I deviate momentarily to admit that I’m the person who steps away from the dinner table, regardless of guests, to go online and track down or verify some essential piece of trivia. I’m certainly not the only one, in this universe of everything available both instantly and electronically, but my info-snobbery may set me apart. For the real gen* I often go “beyond Google”, Wikipedia and the other user-generated sources.

This year I’ve followed a Libraryland debate about the future of reference services around the world. Apparently, many public libraries have recorded new lows in the number of reference questions they receive. “Now we’ve got the internet,” some people suggest, “we don’t need trained and specialist library staff to help us find stuff.”  

We may not need some of the printed books that have traditionally been the authorities, collectively offering The Answer To Every Question. It’s unlikely the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, accessible online through Auckland Libraries membership, will ever be printed, and at the Sir Edmund Hillary Library in Papakura, I was sad to see recent international reference books on sale for a dollar apiece. The library didn’t have the space, I gathered, and people didn’t use them any more.
 

R is for Reference: books bought for a dollar
apiece at Papakura Public Library.

The result in Papakura wasn’t entirely negative: my partner and I found good homes for some of the rejected volumes, and anyway, as members of Auckland Libraries many townspeople are encouraged to use the extensive, authoritative electronic reference databases to which the city subscribes. 

Going Google-Eyed?
There’s a tendency, though, to assume anyone can find what they want these days by typing a word or two into a general search engine. At a public library branch in my part of Auckland, I was dismayed when a friendly staff member directed me to Google. Even though I showed him which authoritative New Zealand bird book I wanted from an official-looking booklist, he thought (after we discovered its absence from the shelf) I’d find what I needed on Google Images.

Effective reference services — ones that use trained organic brains as well as search-engine brawn — are more important than ever in libraries. I love the way Eugenie Prime, then head librarian at Hewlett-Packard, put it in a passionate, quirky doco, The Hollywood Librarian. “We [Librarians] help people define what their information need is,” she said. “Many people ...ask questions, and it’s not the real question. We have a way of getting people to share with us what that problem is and then are able to package the answer in a way they would want. Google can’t meet that, no way.”  

Today’s reference services may involve showing library users how to find things out, and where; how to assess the quality of information and access the most valuable sources. This is knowledge we all need in an age of information overload, and librarians are among the best to help us get it. Of course many simple, straightforward questions are asked in public libraries, and some of the askers may not be equipped to absorb a detailed and on-the-spot demonstration of research techniques. In those cases an old-fashioned method of reference help — serving up The Perfect and Indisputable Answer on a plate — is still good.

Empty section, downtown library, Edmonton.

Before people will consult reference services and their trained staff, it’s important to publicise their availability and value. Enter Edmonton Public Library and its marketing campaign. But does EPL go on to “help you navigate a universe of information”? Well, maybe. On the face of it, the big downtown branch didn’t do that when I was in town.

Reference Points in a Downtown Library

The purpose-designed building next to Churchill Square dates from 1967, but the Stanley A. Milner Library layout has clearly been updated over the years. There’s a new children’s library out the front, and another refit of the whole complex seemed to be underway when I returned after an inspiring first encounter. 

What gave me that impression? Rows and rows of empty shelves, with no indication of where books had gone or might be moving, and why. Vacant or superceded enquiry desks, with nothing to say whether they might be staffed. Mixed messages and obsolescence in signs, logos and fittings.

I loved the EPL marketing campaign, the library network’s extensive collections of CDs and DVDs, its writer in residence scheme, its wide-ranging programme of events and the EPL facilities I saw at Strathcona, the University of Alberta (eplGo), Callingwood (Lois Hole) and Woodcroft. I wanted to love the downtown library, too, but apart from the separate children’s library (where hanging out too long as an unaccompanied adult might get you some strange looks), on the day I visited it didn’t feel like a place where I could navigate a universe of information. Hell, I’d be lucky if I could navigate a single storey — or story.

Empty Desk Syndrome
Edmonton’s downtown library didn’t feel like a place with trained professionals available and eager to help. Oh, there were enquiry desks here and there. But the brilliant Access Department for people with disabilities wasn’t staffed (it opens weekdays, nine to five); neither was the Heritage Room; several other enquiry desks had an empty appearance. As I moved about the floor I saw few staff, though library users were in evidence. Even self-service supermarkets have more staff out and about, it occurred to me.

The EPL Access desk is scheduled for closure, I gather, along with most assistance areas in the downtown branch, and in future those who worked there may staff a single, street-level, enquiry desk. I’d be curious to see how that affects service and the overall atmosphere. Emptying most floor areas of identifiable staff seems a pretty strange initiative for a main branch that (I’ve read) has worked hard to deal with the security, safety and “ambience” problems faced by many downtown libraries. And while I’m all for patron power, I question whether it’s best achieved in a large building by concentrating most trained staff in one relatively small place that’s not exactly central. All these things make me wonder if EPL is putting its money where its marketing mouth is.**

Fine Arts and History desk at
Vancouver downtown library.

Compare and Contrast
While in Canada last month I visited another downtown library, Vancouver’s. Although its branding, handouts and posters aren’t as slick as Edmonton’s and some collections appear smaller, I think this city has got it mostly right. Vancouver has staffed desks on every level, signs that are relevant and a lot more handouts recommending books and reference materials on topics of current interest. Nothing seemed in a state of flux when I was there; everything was being used. I felt I could navigate — or that if I got myself lost, I could at least locate a staff member.

Admittedly the Vancouver downtown library building is much newer but libraries, to paraphrase EPL marketing, are bigger than their buildings. They’re about people, even for diehard information junkies like me.

 * It’s typical that on typing “gen” I felt the need to look it up using my mobile wireless broadband and Auckland Libraries’ Oxford Reference Online, where the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang told me it was “Brit, orig services'. noun”, meaning “Information. 1940–. Daily Telegraph ‘A vast amount of “gen” is included, and this will be invaluable for settling arguments’ (1970).” 

** Please check comment #2, from a well informed someone reassuring me that under the new set-up, staff will indeed be out and about in EPL’s downtown branch.

Cups, Pucks, Rucks and Reading

Public bus in Canuck ice hockey team strip, downtown Vancouver.

Eleven thousand kilometres: it’s a long way from a game of rugby — but somehow I managed without the Rugby World Cup during a month in Canada. It may have something to do with being a supposed rarity, a Kiwi who’s not into sport. Or perhaps it was because in the land of the puck and the Stanley Cup, the oval ball was still (conversationally) kicked in my direction now and then.

At a LitFest (non-fiction festival) event in Edmonton, an author signing his book for me enquired if I was South African, then tried to make up for it by presuming I was excited about the rugby. At the Vancouver International Writers Festival, the obligatory words about tearing himself away from the World Cup introduced New Zealand’s own Lloyd Jones. Then one night in downtown Vancouver a fellow Kiwi who must have overheard what a Canadian friend calls my “ixcint” followed me off the bus, telling me she was looking for “the game” — the final, I suddenly recalled, New Zealand versus France — and some “young ones” to watch it with.

I don’t know if it’s true that we’re “even more fanatical” about rugby than the Welsh,* but after a lifetime of bemused looking on (I’m a spectator of rugby spectators rather than of the game itself) I have to concede that as a nation we are fairly interested, at the very least. Not that we always look it. At the Vancouver festival’s grand opening, one of my Canadian companions interpreted Jones’s laconic response to the MC’s introduction as complete indifference to rugby. On the contrary, I said: he’s really keen. Perhaps I should have taken the opportunity to deliver an impromptu lecture in Kiwi Culture 101.

Lloyd Jones, world famous since Mister Pip found a place on the 2007 shortlist of the Booker Prize, was world famous in New Zealand before that. Although he initially made waves here with work such as Biografi (1993, contentious for its defiance of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction), his Book of Fame (2000) really made his name.

That award-winning novel is about the real-life 1905 tour of Britain by New Zealand’s rugby “Originals” and, having recommended it to numerous people over the years, I’ve decided it’s time I read it again — to see if I can get away with recommending it to my even more non-sporting parents and brother, also to find out if it’s still one of my favourite New Zealand novels. Sadly, it wasn’t on sale at the Vancouver festival (though his latest novel, Hand Me Down World, was). Now I’m home I’ve ordered it from the public library, together with a recent edition of Australia’s Griffith Review in which Jones “reveals how childhood rugby and a reverence for the All Blacks shaped his adult sensibilities and success beyond the Wellington suburbs”.

Ah, the public library. Apart from the passing mention above, does this post on this Latitude of Libraries blog have anything to do with the public library, really, readers may wonder? Well yes, it does. New Zealand, it’s been said more than once,** is about rugby, racing and beer. Maybe we need to rethink that and say instead that New Zealand is about rugby, reading and pies, or some other combination where the presence of libraries is at least implied. Watch this:

It’s a great little video about our love of public libraries (and rugby), released just ahead of this week’s LIANZA (Library and Information Association of NZ Aotearoa) conference. Maker Sally Pewhairangi says it’s in honour of New Zealand’s RWC win; it also celebrates the launch of a new initiative in LIANZA’s “Libraries Count” project. It’ll make you smile — and think.

One of many election issues,
Great South Road, Papakura.

There are plenty of things to think about in the lead-up to New Zealand’s election in a few weeks’ time (the price of pies, for starters) but do spare a thought for our public libraries. They’re far from immune to the penny-pinchitis that has threatened public libraries overseas. For that reason, and because they’re a wonderful thing, I support the national campaign to keep our public libraries both funded and free.

*Former Welsh international John Peter Rhys Williams (1979), quoted in the Reed Book of New Zealand Quotations.

** though possibly first by John Mulgan in his Report on Experience (1947, Reed Book of New Zealand Quotations).

“We share stories” poster and patron at downtown public library branch in Edmonton, Canada.