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The ‘New’ State Library of TasmaniaBev Ewins Manager (Technical Support Services)a

a State Library of TasmaniaPublished online: 28 Oct 2013.

To cite this article: Bev Ewins Manager (Technical Support Services) (1992) The ‘New’State Library of Tasmania, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 23:2, 123-130, DOI:10.1080/00048623.1992.10754771

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The 'New' State Library of Tasmania BEY EWINS nia

Manager (Technical Support Sen,ices), State Library of Tasma-

It would be difficult for someone who has not been a part of the change taking place in the State Library of Tasmania in the past two years to find out what exactly is the current state of affairs. This in part arises from the nature of the change, and the speed with which it has occurred. This article will describe the reasons for the change, and describe the 'new' State Library of Tasmania.

The 1980s were a period of great hardship for the State Library of Tasmania, as they were for the other state libraries. The devaluation of the Australian dollar against other currencies eroded the purchasing power of the bookvote, an erosion from which we have not yet recovered. The pressure of successive governments to reduce the size of the public service saw a shrinking staff attempting to maintain -services without cuts to anything but the funds to support them. The introduction and development of an inhouse computer system, with its potential for increased efficiency, was hamstrung by a lack of adequate funding to do more than make piecemeal gains.

The State Library of Tasmania provides a statewide public library service, reference and information services, and includes three major special collections. At the end of the 1980s it was continuing to support 86 service points. This included 69 branch libraries, which had their origins back in the 1940s to 1960s when they were run by municipal councils, and the pattern of transport and access to facilities was different to the 1980s. A program of regionalisation had been completed, with the sixth of seven planned regional headquarters buildings having been opened in June 1989. In attempting to survive within shrinking budgets, services were pared back, with staff and public feeling that our goal of a quality library service was in jeopardy.

In July 1989 the Field Government took office. Within days of the commence­ment of its term, it announced that the State Library of Tasmania would amalgamate with the new Department of Education and the Arts. The Archives Office of Tasmania become a partner section within the Division of Culture and the Arts, together with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board executive office, subsequently renamed the Office of the Arts.

Apprehension levels were high, as staff wondered what the impact of the change would be. The focus of government, departmental and public attention was on schools. The controversy surrounding an almost totally abortive effort to close schools in the second half of 1989 distracted attention from the State Library, and virtually no change occurred until early in 1990.

At this time the last State Librarian left his position, and the restructure of the State Library commenced. Acting appointments were made to the positions of Deputy Secretary (Culture and the Arts) and State Librarian, and the Secretary of the Department shifted his attention to the integration of the State Library within the structure, rather than it continuing as an appendage.

This restructure commenced with the separation from the State Library of those

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management functions which fitted more appropriately within the corporate ser­vices sector of the department, such as human resource management, finance and facilities. Planning and development remained as a function of the library service, and a small residue of services such as library supply, security and despatch remained, as part of the Technical Support Services Section. The introduction of this structure was a lengthy process, involving considerable discussion and debate, and to describe it would take more space than this article permits.

In 1990 the government brought in an amendment to the Libraries Act 1984 which resulted in an increase in the contribution made by local government for the provision of library service by the State from 0.25 cents in the dollar of annual average value, to 0.35 cents. Because of the effects of the simultaneous introduc­tion of annual adjustments, rather than the former five-yearly increases flowing from the revaluation cycle, this resulted in an increase in the local government contribution to $4.7m, or approximately 40% of the total costs of the library service. By this process the government met one of the points of criticism of the Grants Commission, which was that the State of Tasmania was spending too much on libraries compared to the other states.

In June 1990 Peter Patmore, Minister for Education and the Arts, announced that a review of the department would be carried out by an international firm of consultants called Cresap. While the terms of reference of the review quite clearly referred to the State Library, so vague was the public perception of the effects of the creation of the mega-departments in 1989, that many were unaware that the State Library was involved. Again, there was a four-month period of discussion, submissions, an interim report which brought howls of protest at the recommenda­tions, and a final report 1 the recommendations of which were accepted almost totally by the government.

On 21 December 1990, the implementation of a major recommendation of the review concerning the State Library was announced, the closure from 1 January 1991 of 26 branch libraries. A further six libraries serving Hydro villages were to be closed if the Hydro-Electric Commission was not prepared to meet an increased proportion of the cost of their operation. The libraries closed included both rural and urban branches, and there was considerable protest about both the desirability and the timing of the closures, announced on the last day of opening prior to Christmas in some cases. Staff employed in the branches were offered employment in other libraries or retirement (including mandatory redundancies), and total staffing was reduced by 15 FTE.

Obviously the previous regional structure could not continue with the number of branches reduced to 43, and in addition the regions provided a top heavy management structure which had been criticised by both the Cresap Report and previous reports. Discussions commenced with staff, union and other stakeholders on the restructure of the State Library. A joint steering committee was established, with members from both management and the Tasmanian Public Service Associa­tion, to provide a medium for maximum consultation and agreement on important aspects of the restructure.

During the latter part of 1990 the department had called for expressions of interest from staff interested in taking redundancy packages. State Library staff

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FIGURE 1

lEDUCATION & THE ART~ I

I CULTURE • THE ARTS J __.

I STATE LIBRARY J I OFFICE OF THE j-DIRECTOR

li..IBAAAY SEAYICESl

I 1 I 1 n TECHNICAL I REFERENCE & _j PUBLIC LIBRARY I ,; PUBLIC LIBRARY

J SUPPORT SERVICES INFORMATION SERVICES SERVICES INORTHI SERVICES ISOUTHI

H ~ RESOURCES I H PUBLIC REFERENCE J BURNIE LIBRARY I H HOBART LENDING I SERVICES LIBRARY

H TECHNICAL SERVICES I H STATE REFERENCE I LIBRARY

H DEVONPORT LIBRARY I ~ GLENORCHY LIBRARY I H PRE- CATALOGUING I ~BIBLIOGRAPHIC, H LAUNCESTON

SERVICES LENDING LIBRARY J H ROSNY LIBRARY J H CATALOGUING I H REFERENCE J H BRANCH SERVICES J H BRANCH SERVICES J SERIALS

COLLECTIONS

~ CIRCULATION I I AREA REFERENCE i ~ NORTH-EAST I H KINGSTON I PREP. LIBRARY SERVICES

~ SYSTEMS PLANNING I ~ '-AUNCESTON J H BRANCHES I H BRANCHES I & CONTROL REFERENCE LIBRARY

H I ~ BOOKMOBILES I ~- BOOKMOBILES J BINDERY H GOVERNMENT LIBRARY J & INFORMATION SERVICE

~ I J LIBRARY SUPPLY

H PARLIAMENTARY LIBAAAYJ ... NORTH-WEST CHILORENS SERVICES J

SERVICES LIBRARIAN

~ TASMANIANA LIBRARY I H BRANCHES I -~ I J ALLPORT LIBRARY • I BOOKMOBILE

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

w CHILDREN$ SERVICES I LIBRARIAN

surplus to requirement, or whose retirement would leave vacancies to which others could transfer from unwanted positions, were offered redundancies. The restruc­ture of the former regional library system took several months, and resulted in the structure shown in Figure 1. In june 1991, a further amendment occurred with the transfer of the Conservation Sub-Section from the Technical Support Services Section to the Archives Office of Tasmania.

The change to the structure was radical. There was a substantial loss of senior experience with the change from a regional system with seven regional librarians to a two area structure with two managers. A staffing freeze had been in place since prior to the review, but once the structure was finalised in March 1991 the process of recruiting staff to fill over 40 vacancies, including the position of the first Director (Library Services) commenced. This is now well under way, and Robyn Collins took up her position as Director on 16 September 1991. An enthusiastic team of managers is being developed, and a commitment has been made to provide

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training where required to back up previous experience.

It would be naive to think that any review carried out in a time of recession did not have as one of its objectives a reduction in budgets. The department's budget did reduce, and within the year of the review achieved a saving of some $30m. The State Library saving requirement from the recommendations was $315 000 and $713 000 in a full year. This has been achieved, largely from the savings from closed branches, but also from the restructure of the service, and the pruning and flattening of the management structure.

A further recommendation of the review was that the funding of the bookvote should revert to a previous arrangement where it was split between recurrent and capital components, but most importantly - unlike previously - it is now possible for the State Library to transfer funds from one line item to another within its recurrent" budget. This means that savings made from greater efficiency or productivity can be transferred to areas of need, and an obvious candidate for such savings is the bookvote. The funds provided by the government in 1991·92 total $1.7m which is sufficient to maintain the number of volumes at 1990-91 levels, and purchase about 10 000 more volumes than in 1989-90. The reduction in the number of branches has resulted in the consolidation of the bookstock, and accelerated the weeding of aged and obsolete materials, resulting in a more up to date, but smaller collection. From there we must begin rebuilding the lending and reference collections, and a draft budget policy paper which begins to address this need has already been written. Some preliminary work on collection development policy has yet to be reviewed and accelerated to meet a commitment made to complete this by 1992. A policy for the Tasmaniana Library has been drafted and is under review.

The staffing establishment of the State Library Service has shrunk in the past two years from 330 to 267 FTE, with 22.4 FTE having transferred with the Archives Office of Tasmania. The salaries budget has fallen to 62.5% of the total budget, excluding new building costs. The bookvote has risen to 14.5% of the budget, with the potential for this percentage to be increased by improved productivity. The State Library budget for 1991-92 is $12 148 000. Additional funds have been provided in the travel and training line items not only to underpin the require­ments of the Training Guarantee Act but also to give greater attention to training and staff development as was recognised as a priority in the restructure. A major barrier to adequate staff training in Tasmania is the cost of travel to attend interstate courses, conferences and seminars, since many such training opportunities are not available in Tasmania.

As part of the negotiations for the acceptance of the new organisational struc­ture, the State Library has introduced a training positions scheme, not only to provide access to more staff to experience a wider range of tasks but also to increase the skill base generally, and provide for an increased pool of staff eligible for promotional positions on either a temporary or permanent basis. Under this scheme staff may apply for designated positions, and work through an agreed training program, detailed in a learning contract with the host section. Those positions which have been filled so far have been highly sought after, and have generated considerable interest from staff. Previously, opportunities to work in different sections of the State Library had been dependent on casual vacancies, or

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periods of staff leave, bur the new scheme guarantees rhar the designated positions will be available to new transferees ar least once a year.

Because of branch closures, some buildings in the Stare Library system which would have been replaced or refurbished as parr of the upgrading program are no longer required. In most cases, the premises were leased. Only one building has been listed in the current triennium for construction, a new 350 sqm branch library ar Scorrsdale, a country centre in rhe northeast of rhe stare. This library is scheduled for completion in June 1992, and will replace a previous building no longer adequate ro meet the needs of the local community. Construction will be funded on the basis of a one-third contribution by the Scorrsdale Municipality, and two-thirds by the government, including furniture and firrings, bur with bookstock provided by the Stare Library. A work of art will be provided under the Art for Public Buildings Scheme.

A building is urgently required for the fast-growing urban area of Kingston, where rented premises are used ro meet the needs of a population of about 30 000 in the Municipality of Kingborough. Because this was ro have been the last of the regional library buildings, the size of the proposed premises has been reduced, bur this project has yet to enter the listings for the government capital works program. A range of funding options will have ro be considered.

The other focus on building is on the redevelopment of the Launceston Library, which houses both the lending and reference libraries, and temporarily the Branch Services Section for the north of the stare. The Hobart building is also sorely in need of redevelopment, bur this is seen as a longer-term project, requiring substantial funding, for which planning is embryonic. Meanwhile, space limitations are a concern, and a program ro complete the installation of compacrus in the 1972 Tower Block is proceeeding on an incremental basis as funds are earmarked each year ro complete a further section. Also of concern has been a Department of Construction report advising the library to reorganise materials stored in the Tower Block ro more evenly distribute the weight, which has been concentrated in sections devoted ro the storage of newspapers, or heavy claycoared paper publica­tions such as art books. The compacting will help address this problem. Similar redistribution of materials was required in the Stare Reference Library, because of the concentration of weight in the sections used for map cabinets, and microfiche and microfilm storage.

In the past three years, two upgrades have been made to the Prime mini-com­purer system on which the Stare Library runs irs acquisitions, cataloguing and circulation systems. From 1986 to November 1990, circulation was handled by a distributed circulation system on Zilog microcomputers in Hobart, Launceston and Glenorchy. In anticipation of a crash, expected imminently once the Zilogs reached the end of their useful life, systems staff investigated options for transfer to a centralised circulation system, and our software supplier, Darabasix, provided a rest copy of ADCIRC. Ir proved acceptable, and as it turned our, essential, when the Launcesron Zilog crashed irretrievably, and after a week of manual circulation the ADCIRC system went live. Approval was subsequently sought - and given - to upgrade the Prime P4150 to a P5340, to enable the transfer of Hobart and Glenorchy to ADCIRC early in 1991, and in June 1991 the first library ro change to automated circulation since 1982, ar Rosny, went live without a hitch.

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ADCIRC was also installed at Burnie and Devonport libraries early in 1992, and on current performance it is expected that the present Prime configuration will handle the additional workload without unreasonable loss of response time. Once this goal has been reached, more than half of the 4.5 million loans made from lending libraries in Tasmania each year will be handled on the system. In addition to stock control this will enable the efficient handling of reservations on a global basis throughout the state, with a client in one location able to request an item held in another, and expect it to be reserved in the other location and sent to their base when it becomes available for loan.

To this end, a major project for 1990·91, almost completed, has been the barcoding of all extant stock purchased prior to 1986 for lending collections. Over 600 000 items held in the six major libraries are now fully controlled, with only stock being sorted and reallocated from closed branch libraries remaining to be processed.

It has been frustrating for State Reference Library staff to have to watch the increasing automation of the selection, acquisition, and circulation functions, and inhouse automated cataloguing of lending materials without parallel progress in the automation of reference functions, in particular an online public access catalogue, and the automation of the major indexes compiled by staff, both in Hobart and outside the capital. A further project yet to advance beyond the planning stage is the automation of the Tasmaniana Index, a card-based product of State Reference Library staff, which would thereby be distributed statewide and available for additions and updating by staff throughout the State Library network of reference libraries in regional centres.

Because the Elizabeth Computer Centre already served the Department of Education, prior to the State Library joining the department, one question raised by the Cresap team was the desirability or otherwise of providing service to both school and public libraries through one rather than two systems sections. There appears to be potential for the elimination of duplication of hardware and possibly software, and perhaps also for a reduction in staffing levels. Apart from a recom­mendation that the State Library computer system be replaced by new software and that the decision on hardware be made once the software had been selected, the Cresap Report made no more specific recommendation. A decision must be made on the future application of computing in the department, and planning has commenced for a complete analysis of requirements, to be followed by the development of an EDP plan for the agency as a whole. There is a wide range of options to be considered, and the library will be developing a number of models for discussion in the process. The deadline for a decision from the State Library's point of view is the expiry of the current hardware lease in February 1995.

An increasingly computer-literate public has taken with alacrity to public-access CD-ROM databases made available during the year in major reference libraries. The lead was given when BHP donated the Domesday Video Laser disk and hardware, and C-DATA and Supermap to the State Library in the Bicentennial Year. This generated a great deal ot publicity and interest. The installation of CD-ROM equipment has helped not only the public to obtain information in timely fashion, but has also provided the opportunity for staff inexperienced in the searching of

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online databases to explore the databases without the pressure of communications costs, and improve their searching skills.

A further recommendation of the Cresap Report was the abolition of the previous Regional Library Advisory Committees, whose role as advisers to the Regional Librarians and the Minister through the Tasmanian Library Advisory Board was negated by the change to a two-area system. A new model for the Tasmanian Library Advisory Board was proposed, with members comprising representation of the community from nominees of Friends Groups rather than local government. Since the government had recently increased the contribution made by local government, this recommendation met fierce opposition from that quarter. Lengthy discussions have been held with the committees, individual councils, the Munici­pal Association of Tasmania, and members of the Tasmanian Library Advisory Board over many months to canvass views on the possible composition of a new board and two advisory committees. The necessary change to the legislation will be made in 1992 and until then it will be necessary to reconstitute the boards and regional committees.

The Tasmanian Library Advisory Board has sought advice on the establishment of a Library Foundation, and this may well be a productive source of publicity and funds for the State Library Service as a whole. With so many Tasmanian-based businesses having their head offices elsewhere, it may be difficult to secure donations from other than wealthy private individuals, without competing with similar foundations elsewhere.

The State Library of Tasmania supports the concept and development of the Distributed National Collection. Its contribution so far has been the provision of records to the Australian Bibliographical Network as a full member since June 1983. The retrospective conversion of the State Reference Library card catalogue for addition to the proposed first phase of automation of that catalogue over the next few years will be a further contribution. More tentative has been the State Library's commitment to the Conspectus approach to collection assessment and comparison. Selected staff were participants in a recent Conspectus Training Workshop conduct­ed by the ACLIS Conspectus Officer in Hobart, and this has provided the knowl­edge base for a more wholehearted commitment to the concept.

Like libraries throughout the country, we have been fighting a long-running battle against proposals from all quarters that we move to a user pays service. Our position has been to support the ACLIS Guidelines on Funding which distinguish between basic and value-added services. A feasability study of a potential service to business and industry has been conducted, and establishment awaits government endorsement and the availability of sufficient funds to seed the project until it achieves cost-recovery.

A further source of funds yet to be fully exploited is the charging of reproduc­tion fees for pictorial works in the collections. This is as much a preservation measure as a revenue raiser, since word had spread throughout Australia that where many other libraries charge fees already, the State Library of Tasmania still provided copies at cost of copying.

The conservation of library materials is, as elsewhere, a problem of such magnitude it is difficult to come to grips with how it might be tackled. Backlogs of

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hundreds of person-years of work are almost inconceivable. The State Library Bindery rebinds over 20 000 items each year. Newspapers are no longer bound, but are wrapped in tissue and plastic and stored flat in acid-free boxes ready for future microfilming. Funds have been earmarked for a regular program to microfilm Tasmanian newspapers as part of the National Newspaper Plan. A working party commenced discussions on means to increase the output of the various conserva­tion staff within the government sector, including the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery's Conservation Centre in Launceston. Not much progress has been made as yet, but this is certainly on the list of projects to be addressed.

Finally, the care, maintenance and conservation of the works in the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts are a source of considerable concern. While the bequest provided handsomely for the purchase of additional or replacement works for the collection, it made no provision for the cost of staffing, housing and preserving it. The charging of reproduction fees is one source of funds for this purpose, but the question of whether it is appropriate to continue to house this collection within the State Library building when space is becoming a pressing consideration is one which was raised not only by the Cresap team.

This article necessarily highlights the changes, challenges and problems of the State Library of Tasmania. It does not dwell on the continued achievements which are more properly recorded in the department's annual report. While change is traumatic while it is occurring, it has resulted in a no-fat organisation, with a more rigorous budgeting process, and a staff dedicated to the future effectiveness of the library service.

Notes

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Cresap [Firm] Final Report: Reuieu• of the Department of Education and the Arts, Tasmania for Peter Patmore, MHA, Minister for Education and the Arts Cresap Hobart 1990.

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