Valedictory

When John Vallance announced his retirement Openbook editor Phillipa McGuinness invited him to reflect on his tenure at the Library.

Here he is in his own words.

WHAT DID YOU HOPE TO ACHIEVE WHEN YOU STARTED AS STATE LIBRARIAN SIX YEARS AGO?

To open up the Library as far as possible to serve the whole community. For many years the State Library had been seen primarily as a research library. It is, of course, but it is so much more.

It seemed to me that the Library was an unsung treasure that, in a paradoxical way, had its back to the community that loves it. I wanted to see things turned around. One way of doing that was to try and reach a point where anyone off the street, even if they’re not a researcher, reader or a writer, could wander around and get a sense of what sort of place it was, what sort of things we had in our collections. And be made welcome.

We’re still in the early stages of realising this ambition to open up, to improve access — of course it’s not the work of any one individual. In technical terms, this ambition has involved some complex work — improving the public wi-fi and digital access systems, developing the online catalogues through the Collection Experience Project, supporting the development of the National edeposit scheme, Trove, expanding our physical and digital conservation and preservation capacity, expanding public programs, the John B Fairfax Learning Centre, the Children’s Library and so on.

Finally, I was keen to improve relations with the thousands of philanthropists and benefactors whose support for us is as close to altruistic as I’ve seen in a cultural institution. Members of our Foundation aren’t trying to buy social prestige — they simply love the Library.

Throughout my time I’ve had the benefit of an extremely supportive Library Council. So the scene was set from the start.

WHAT ABOUT THE REFURBISHMENT OF THE MITCHELL READING ROOM?

I really wanted to see the Mitchell Reading Room restored to something close to its original appearance. I never liked the 1980s hole in the floor. I thought that the old carpet tiles were ugly. And the furniture … at one point in the 1990s there were all these old metal filing cabinets. We seemed to have lost respect for the beauty of the room. There was also a sense that in order to keep up with the rest of the world, you had to fill the place with technology. I had thought for a long time that this didn’t reflect what the community at large thinks about its oldest library. There was a high-profile campaign when I was on the Library Council in 2014 about retaining the Mitchell Reading Room as it was, rather than moving special collections into what’s now the Gallery Room. 

DID THE SUCCESS OF THAT CAMPAIGN GALVANISE YOU WHEN YOU BECAME STATE LIBRARIAN?

Yes, it did. Well, first, I was pleased to see that people really did love the Reading Room as much as I did. We weren’t just mouthing elitist platitudes about beauty and tradition. Secondly, that people really do like physical books, and reading. You only need to go to a bookshop or join a book club to see that people adore reading and holding books in their hands. The book is not dead — it was never going to be dead. I remember when I was an academic at Cambridge in the 1990s, there were people in my college saying that the physical book would not exist in a few years and that libraries wouldn’t need to be big anymore. All you needed was a screen and a hard disk. It’s hard to imagine people ever getting things more wrong.

I remember there were iterations of the Mitchell Reading Room during the 1980s where it was all broken up with little carrells — as they were called then — cubicles like you might find in a polling booth. There was a computer in each one and this was called innovation. Today, the Reading Room is generally full of people, nearly all under the age of 25. They’ve got laptops of course, but it’s a plain room with fine furniture and lovely new carpet. And it’s full. There are more tables — its capacity has increased by about 70 or 80 seats.

TELL ME ABOUT THE CRITICS’ PICKS SHELVES.

There are still people who think they have had a State Librarian who’s not a librarian himself and therefore didn’t get it, but I hope I’ve been able to bring a fresh pair of eyes to the business of actually using the Library. I knew that a lot of people felt that it was the sort of place you could use only if you knew what you wanted before you came. That’s a problem. It’s the same with all the big research libraries, for instance the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. You can’t just drop in to browse. The trouble is, if you’re going to be asking governments for more than $100 million a year of public money to support libraries across the state, they’re going to need to be persuaded that there’s broad public benefit. A pure research library on that model isn’t going to fit that bill. Fortunately, there was no binary decision we had to take. You can have a great research library which is also accessible to a wide public.

Back in 2017, there were remarkably few books on public access. I thought it would be good if we could find a way of acquiring selected books that had been reviewed in the main English-language review journals. (And we are building collections in community languages.)  

We started looking at The Sydney Review of Books, the Australian Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and began hoovering up books that were being published and reviewed. Colleagues developed a brilliant way of cataloguing them quickly and getting them out on the shelves.

Now we have a constantly refreshed collection of some of the most influential new books published in English around the world across all the discipline areas of interest to curious people. I don’t know of another state library that does something quite like Critics’ Picks. We’ve got two floors full, on public access, and then they go down to Stack Five after they’ve been out in the open air for a little while. So that’s a general resource that the Library hadn’t had in quite the same way before.

WHAT SURPRISED YOU MOST WHEN YOU STARTED WORKING HERE AS STATE LIBRARIAN? GOOD AND BAD!

What surprised me most was … it’s complicated. My colleagues at the Library are experienced and professional and they have strong views about how things should be done. But at some level they’d been told that they couldn’t take on major decisions or projects themselves. There was a culture of outsourcing important creative work. (In fact, I think that it happens across the whole of the public service.) So the Library spent millions of dollars on outside consultants doing work that staff of the Library could not only do but, in my view, could almost invariably do better.

WHAT KINDS OF WORK?

Here’s one example. When we received the generous donation to build the upstairs eastern galleries in the Mitchell Building from the late Michael Crouch, outside consultants were engaged to work out how best the new galleries could be used. I’m not criticising any of my colleagues — it’s important to stress that — but it’s part of a general public service culture that when a large amount of money arrives you think, ‘Oh I don’t want to be made responsible for spending this.’ And so the Library commissioned outside consultants. One of the first decisions I made when I came was to cancel the outside consultant’s plans for these galleries because I realised that we already had brilliant exhibition and curatorial staff who were keen and able to do the work themselves.

The idea for the Paintings Galleries came into being in a similar way. These galleries were basically funded out of money that we saved on consultants’ fees. That money allowed us to repolish the floors, fix the walls so they were strong enough to hold paintings, get started on the restoration of the pictures and face the challenge of how to hang them. The Picture Galleries are emblematic of the creative strength of the staff of the Library. The salon hangs were conceived, the pictures and frames were prepared, the handbills, the curatorial work were all done by staff at the Library.

HAD YOU ALWAYS PLANNED TO DO THE PICTURE GALLERIES?

Yes, ever since someone took me down to see the underground framed picture store. I will never forget that day.

WOULD YOU SAY THAT OVER THE TIME YOU’VE BEEN HERE EXHIBITIONS HAVE BECOME MORE AMBITIOUS?

I do think that. What’s more, they’ve been produced against a background of Treasury-imposed efficiency dividends. The Library has exploded with activity, but we’ve had no more staff. Sometimes I sit up in bed and think, ‘How on earth have they done this?’ It’s not as if we’ve taken on an army of people to run these new galleries. But the exhibitions and curatorial people really are perfectionists and whenever there’s a new show — Dead Central, Imagine, Kill or Cure — they are so thoroughly thought-through, curated, designed and executed. Only a first-class library could put on the recent Pride (R)evolution exhibition. You couldn’t imagine that exhibition being produced anywhere else.

WHY DO YOU SAY THAT?

A lot of exhibitions in galleries and museums have a particular generic character and a certain kind of presentation. The Library’s shows have a deep-rooted narrative, archival element which grows out of the unique nature of our collections. On top of that, the way that colleagues have been prepared to put their own personal lives on show in Pride (R)evolution gives it a social, personal impact that many more formal exhibitions don’t have. We have the Charles Rodius and Wadgayawa Nhay Dhadjan Wari exhibitions on show. They have redone the Objects Gallery downstairs. The new Photography Gallery and Shot exhibition has now opened. It’s a mind-boggling amount of work that’s being done by a small number of people.

DO YOU THINK IT’S SUSTAINABLE?

It’s sustainable in the short term because of the enthusiasm and motivation of the people who work here. Even the people who get grumpy, it’s not just a job for them — it really matters. To be fair though, I think we are going to need to invest more in specialist staff working in these curatorial and exhibition areas if it’s to be sustainable in the longer term.

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO YOUR SUCCESSOR?

I doubt that my successor will want any advice — but I would hope that the next State Librarian loves the collections and respects the skills of the people who work here. And doesn’t see it as a purely process-driven job. A lot of libraries run on the back of process and little else.

When I arrived, I raised a few eyebrows because one of the first things I did was ask for a pass so I could go down on my own into the stacks. Not that many State Librarians had done that before because they tended to sit in meetings from dawn until dusk and sign bits of paper. Every day I’ve spent at least half an hour in the stacks on my own just strolling about looking at things. That has been a pleasure that I hope my successor will discover as well.

WHAT HAVE YOU DISCOVERED DOWN THERE? WHAT SURPISED, DELIGHTED OR SHOCKED YOU?

There’s plenty that shocked and surprised me. But one of the things that I loved most was a collection of — not quite ephemera but not far off it — old telephone directories, magazines and comic books from the time of my early childhood. Move over Proust and the dipped madeleine — take a trip to Stack One and rediscover your past.

To tell the truth, there’s so much, I wouldn’t know where to begin.

IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WISH THAT THE LIBRARY HAD IN ITS COLLECTION?

I’m excited about our new rare book acquisition program that’s just underway. When we talk about ourselves as one of the great libraries in the world it’s almost like whistling in the dark — as if we don’t quite believe it. But we are. And with a relatively small number of key strategic purchases, we could put ourselves easily in the top ten great libraries of the world.

CAN YOU NAME WHAT SOME OF THOSE ACQUISITIONS MIGHT BE?

I’ve been told not to because dealers might inflate prices if they know we are after particular items. We started with a shopping list which we’ve now got through, thanks in good part to our benefactors. There’s more to come, supported by the Library’s extraordinary Foundation.

I have a particular interest in music and I’d love us to expand our holdings of printed music. Some people think it’s not appropriate for the State Librarian to be imposing a personal interest on collecting. But I’d say it’s been happening throughout the history of this and every great collecting institution. An institution always reflects the concerns of the people who are running it. It’s no accident that the Picture Galleries were the first to open because the Library’s pictures are a real love of mine.

WHAT HAVE YOU ENJOYED LEAST?

Meetings.

WHAT HAVE YOU ENJOYED MOST?

This job has been an extraordinary privilege and I do realise how lucky I’ve been. There’s not much that I haven’t enjoyed. I don’t like bureaucracy. I don’t like meetings. I don’t like dealing with certain outside agencies. I find that very tricky. But there’s very little here that I haven’t enjoyed.

And I have learned a huge amount from my colleagues — far more than they might think I have.

One of the things that’s given me a huge sense of satisfaction, perhaps the most important stuff I’ve been involved with, is the work with public libraries. Getting public library funding fixed up has been central. The PLS (Public Library Services) team are simply extraordinary. We’ve seen government funding for public libraries across the state more than double. Public libraries are really enjoying a bit of a renaissance at the moment, and those PLS colleagues are firmly driving this.

A colleague in PLS took me on a trip to the remand centre in Silverwater a couple of years ago. Various people have been working to get tablets and ebooks into NSW prison cells. With our strong support, Corrective Services have now got nearly 7000 tablets issued to prisoners. I’m really proud of that.

The Indigenous Engagement team is also working on family history projects in prisons with Indigenous prisoners. Things like that don’t hit the headlines but have a huge impact on the everyday lives of the many thousands of people incarcerated in our prisons. More than a third of the prison population is Indigenous.

Finally, I’ve loved seeing Openbook grow to the point where it is now a rich window into the life and culture of this very special place.

WITH HINDSIGHT, IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY?

I know that I have made mistakes along the way, but time marches on. 

WHAT ABOUT THE LIBRARY BAR? DO YOU THINK IT HAS PUT THIS BUILDING ON A DIFFERENT KIND OF CULTURAL MAP?

The Bar’s an interesting one. When I arrived here, the government wanted to build a function centre on the roof of the Mitchell Building.

We managed to persuade the government that it wasn’t their building — even though it is their building — that it was actually the Library’s building. Our last premier (Dominic Perrottet) was very interested in animating the city, as is his successor. We didn’t want to get involved in mass catering, but we discovered small bar licences, with a limit of 120 people. So a small group of us thought, why don’t we do that on the roof? It won’t cost very much.

In the end the Bar, like the Children’s Library and the Galleries, was fundamentally designed by staff of the Library. We had to get an architect in to do some of the technical stuff, but we all got together. It was very much a kind of extended family thing.

Some people were cynical about it. But I think it’s a lovely little bar. It’s been successful and is increasingly being used for events. In its current form it will perhaps have a life of three or four years and will then either expand or be rebuilt. But I think we’ve proved that it can graft on nicely to what we have and build communities very effectively.

YOU COULD NEVER HAVE PREDICTED COVID LOCKDOWNS. BUT YOU WERE COMMITTED  TO REOPENING THE LIBRARY AS SOON AS YOU POSSIBLY COULD.

I think we were the first government agency to reopen on 1 June 2020. It’s quite funny — I remember writing to the Premier’s Department for permission to reopen. And we got a letter back saying that they’d received a request to reopen the Library, could we please advise them! So, I wrote back and said I think this is a terrific idea. And then I got a letter saying yes, we can reopen.

Every time we reopened after a lockdown period, I’d find a queue of people outside waiting to get in at opening time. One of the most moving things of all was discovering after our last lockdown that one of our regular readers (who died recently) has left us nearly $3 million, which we’re about to use to refurbish the reading rooms in the Macquarie Street Building.

It shows how important this institution is. When I was growing up, if you wanted to go somewhere where you knew you’d be treated with respect, you’d think of a church. That’s changed. The Library is now the place where it truly doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, what colour you are … anything. And this Library leads the way in how it looks after everyone from scholars and writers to homeless people — who, it must be said, sometimes turn out to be one and the same.

I EXPECT SOME PEOPLE WHO VISIT ARE SURPRISED BY ALL THE HOMELESS PEOPLE WHO USE THE LIBRARY.

Back in 2018 we were asked by the authorities to switch off the wi-fi at night because it attracted homeless people. We refused. A lot of people who sleep around the Library sleep near outdoor power points and areas where there’s good w-fi. The digital team rebuilt the wi-fi system and we went from having a very patchy, unreliable system to one of the fastest around. We try and look after people whether we are open or closed. And they often return the favour.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO NEXT?

I’m not saying because that might jinx it. It’s often a mistake to tell people what you’re going to do. Better just to do it.

This story appears in Openbook winter 2023.