“Library Services Like Topsy”

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32057, 4 August 1969, Page 12

“Library Services Like Topsy”

Library services in New Zealand, like Topsy, had just grown, Mrs Elsie Locke, a housewife and author, said at a seminar on libraries held on Saturday.

About 80 persons attended the afternoon session of the seminar which was organised by the W. E. A. and the Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Library Association as part,of Book Week. Mrs Locke and Mr M. J. Wooliscroft, deputy librarian at the Canterbury Public Library, were the two main speakers at the first part of the seminar where Mr C. W. Collins, the University of Canterbury librarian, was chairman.

Mrs Locke said there had not been any real recognition of libraries as being part of the civic and cultural life of the city, and that the people who had battled most to make libraries what they ought to be had been the librarians themselves. Christchurch had been slower than the other main centres to establish a library, said Mrs Locke. This may have been partly due to the fact that the founders of Canterbury were highly educated men with their own libraries and who could use each other’s libraries. They were not very concerned with the “mechanics,” who were the people for whom “Mechanics’ Libraries” were first opened in each centre.

It was nine years after the founding of Christchurch before the first “Mechanics’ Library” was opened. This later

I became the responsibility of i Canterbury University Coll lege, as it was then known, • and finally was taken over by ’ the Christchurch City Couni cil. The role of public libraries . was outlined by Mr Woolisi croft He said that nowhere ■ else was there such a wide i range of material available : as at a public library. The system of library users ’ having to pay a rental for I some books was defended by Mr Wolliscroft. He said that if a fee was not charged lib- - raries could not hope to re- : tain present standards and stocks. Other matters discussed were the state of school libraries, the difficulties of organising libraries on a regional basis, and whether or not the Government should provide library services free. The future of the arts in Christchurch was the subject of a panel discussion which ended the seminar. The chairman of the panel, Mr A. T. G. McArthur, senior lecturer in rural education at Lincoln College, summarised the discussion by saying that there was a need for professionalism which required a great deal of money, and a need for long-term education and much public relations work. The panel consisted of Miss M. I. Mullan, headmistress of St Margaret’s College; Mr P. Beaven, an architect; Mr M. Douglass, the engineer for the Regional Planning Authority, Professor J. R. Ritchie, of the University of Canterbury music department; and Mr R. H. T. Thompson, reader in sociology at the University of Canterbury.