Better, more accessible, libraries for all in Australia: progress and potential.

• Author: Bundy, Alan

Australia has four major library sectors, public, academic, school and special. All of those sectors have major strengths and rate well by world standards. Many new and redeveloped buildings have been constructed in them. The academic libraries have been strongly focused on the information/learning commons concept, electronic resources and information literacy education. Public libraries are now available to everyone in Australia, and are receiving increasing attention and new buildings as multidimensional centres for community learning capacity growing. School libraries have many new buildings and a strong focus on information literary education but they often now have inadequate teacher librarian and library technician staff and resources. School library needs were reviewed during 2011 by a committee of inquiry of the Australian federal parliament. Special libraries have experienced cutbacks and institutional changes and mergers but the sector continues to innovate and grow in areas such as law libraries. Australia has the benefit of a strong multisectoral professional library association based in the national capital Canberra, and which is helping all sectors to address areas such as the ageing and education of the profession, library education, professional development, and advocacy. Australia also unusually has a national association for Friends of Australian Libraries to focus citizen advocacy for stronger investment in public libraries in particular. A challenge for the Australian library sectors is to become better informed about the issues and many users they have in common, and to collaborate in practice and in advocacy for better, more accessible, libraries for all. Revised version of a paper commissioned by the French 'Bulletin des Biblioteques de France' and published in its number 6, 2011 pp59-63.

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With over 7.5million [km.sup.2], Australia has the same area as the continental USA and is 14 times larger than metropolitan France. Eighty five per cent of its population of only 23million--projected to at least double by 2050 because of a high birth rate compared with most European countries, and immigration--lives along or close to its 25,760km coastline. That population is largely urbanized. Indigenous Australians comprise 2.3 per cent of the population, and over 160 nationalities are represented in its multicultural population. The country's large inland areas, with their many small towns and villages, represent a major challenge in the delivery of educational, library and health services.

As the world's 14th largest, the Australian economy is service and commodities dominated. There is low unemployment, and skills shortages, including in the library sector. It has largely escaped the impact of the global financial crisis.

The Australian library sector

This comprises public, university, technical and further education and school libraries, and special libraries in private sector organizations and in local, state and federal government departments. The sector accounts for about AUD$2.8billion in annual recurrent expenditure, of which the public library system is the largest at AUD$880million.

Details of all of Australia's academic, public, joint use, and special libraries are to be found in the ninth edition 2009/11 of a print directory Australian libraries: the essential directory. (1) Information about over 5000 Australian libraries is also accessible at the National Library of Australia's website. (2) A comprehensive critical history of Australian libraries from 1830-1995 has been published. (3)

The following paper commences with short commentaries about the academic, school and special library sectors. It then has a longer commentary on Australia's public library sector, which is now accessible to everyone in Australia.

University libraries

University libraries in Australia support 41 institutions. Those universities are largely funded by the federal government, and six of them are usually included in the top 100 rankings of universities worldwide. Most of them are now multicampus, with campuses sometimes hundreds of kilometres apart. Several are multisectoral with the Technical and Further Education Sector. Such distances present special challenges and costs for their institutions and their libraries. Some of the universities have developed great expertise in distance education and online teaching, and their libraries typically offer outstanding support to remote students both within and outside of Australia. Examples include the libraries of the University of South Australia, Deakin University and Charles Sturt University. The Charles Sturt University has the largest library school in Australia, and many of its librarianship students are distance education students living anywhere in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. There has been for several years a national borrowing scheme between the university libraries which permits distance education students to freely borrow from a university library close to where they live, rather than relying just on their enrolled institution's library to send them items through the postal system or electronically.

Other key developments in the university libraries in the last two decades have been a renewal of staffing structures focused on the employment of academic librarians who work very closely with faculty; extensive investment in new buildings, automation, rfid and electronic resources; responding to a large growth in masters and doctoral programs, research, and international students; and a shift to the information/learning commons concept partnering with faculty in improving student learning, with a focus on information literacy development as a critical graduate quality.

The information literacy emphasis owes much to pioneering work by teacher librarians and the Australian School Library Association (ASLA), and the series of annual information literacy conferences held during the 1990s by the University of South Australia Library--and to Australian librarian and researcher Dr Christine Bruce, and her seminal and internationally recognised 1997 book The seven faces of information literacy. (4) This was followed in 2001 by the adoption by the Council of...