ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY REFERENCE DEPARTMENT

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XIII, 1 August 1956, Page 3

ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY REFERENCE DEPARTMENT

The resources of the Alexander Turnbull Library are outstanding in the field of Pacific literature, and the first duty of the Reference Department is to see that students of the Pacific area are given all the assistance that the staff can provide. The Library’s reputation rests perhaps equally on its collections of rare and early printed books, and on its English literature section, but it is with the New Zealand and Pacific material that the day-to-day work of the Reference Department lies.

Although we are a public library in the sense that all citizens have the right to make use of our resources, we nevertheless feel justified in referring enquirers to another library if their question is likely to be answered more quickly and adequately elsewhere. By concentrating on New Zealand and the Pacific, we hope to render a sound service in that field of scholarship for which the Library is uniquely fitted.

The Library’s public does in fact extend beyond Wellington and New Zealand, throughout the world. Enquiries which come to us over the telephone or in person are often of a routine nature and can be answered within a few minutes, but we are also called upon to assist a Government department in carrying out a survey, and the reference work involved can be considerable. The Library made its contribution to the Parliamentary Historian’s investigations into the liquor question in the King Country, and to the assembling of descriptions of previous floods in the Wangaehu river, following the Tangiwai disaster of Christmas 1953.

Apart from local enquirers, users of the Library fall into two groups: those who work in the reading room on lengthy research projects, and those who write for information either from within New Zealand or from overseas. Among those who spend days, and even months, in the reading room during the Library’s working hours are Fulbright students,

post-graduate students of our own University, authors, and lecturers, both foreign and local. They may be relatively few in number, but their needs are many, and in the course of their researches they explore every section of the Library, consulting relevant books, periodicals, newspapers, maps, manuscripts, and illustrative material.

From within New Zealand come many enquiries about local history. A school about to celebrate a jubilee, or a district its centenary, find the references that the Library can often supply a useful starting point for the compilation of their district’s history. When the Library holds the only known copy of a book, it is sometimes necessary to do more than provide the reference: if the extract is short, a typescript copy is made, or if it is long, a photographic copy; for we do not lend books to private individuals, and only rarely to other libraries. One correspondent who lives far from the Turnbull Library, or in fact from a library of any size, is writing an account of the little-known French expedition of Surville which visited these shores in 1769-70. For this he relies almost entirely on prints from microfilm copies of the journals of the expedition, which we have been able to procure from the French archives in Paris, and elsewhere.

Requests from overseas correspondents have a special interest. A Polish scholar requires details about the scientistexplorer Strzelecki, who called at the Bay of Islands in 1839; an American professor needs a microfilm copy of any letters we hold written to or by Thomas Arnold; an Australian author wants an account of Charles Richmond Thatcher’s sojourn as an entertainer on the goldfields of New Zealand; an English historian working on a new life of E. G. Wakefield asks for photo-copies of original documents; a Frenchman interested in his countryman, Baron de Thierry, lists several questions he would like us to investigate; and a German writer, compiling a dictionary of medals, requests a copy of the original order-in-council, and an illustration of the New Zealand Cross.

Questions asked of the Reference Department frequently call for days of searching. In the absence of adequate reference books on New Zealand, and because much of our history still remains to be written or re-written, it is most

important that the results of our findings should not be lost once the questions have been answered. Thus we compile bibliographies, if the subject is large enough, or record the details in catalogue form, so that we are gradually building up an index to New Zealand’s local history. This index is only in its infancy, and contains a strange variety of entries, but its scope is comprehensive in the field of historical material relating to New Zealand, and its potential usefulness considerable.