Galleries of treasures
The lure of Treasures from the World’s Great Libraries was in direct contrast to the conventional image of Australian libraries, which Robert Hughes evoked in 1988 in his foreword to Treasures of the State Library of New South Wales. Hughes wrote: ‘People are apt to think of libraries as caves and gullies that support the marginal fauna of public life—he book-worm, the academic, the “pseudo-intellectual”[1] ... All you can do in them is read and whisper and not much of the latter.’ Treasures from the World’s Great Libraries established in Australia, like never before, that there was much more to libraries-they could also be places with much to see and great popular appeal.
The creation of permanent exhibition areas, including treasures galleries drawing on the libraries’ own collections, has begun contributing to this new identity. The premise of these galleries is that decades of public collecting, often boosted by spectacular philanthropy, created great public holdings largely obscured from view but deserving of public display. As the National Library of Australia titled an exhibition that it staged in 1993 to mark the 25th anniversary of its building, they are The People’s Treasures, which the people should be able to see.
The Library of Congress in Washington DC provided a model in 1997 when it established its treasures gallery, drawing on an eclectic array of items in its collection. These ranged from diaries of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt to the first dime novel and one of the earliest baseball cards. It derived its organising principle from Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, who also gave shape to the library and whose own collection was acquired by it in 1815. Just as Jefferson had divided his own collection into three sections-Memory, Reason and Imagination-so the Library of Congress arranged its Treasures Gallery.
The State Library of New South Wales was the first Australian institution to draw on its own collection in a similar way. In 2002, it devoted a small section of its galleries to its ‘Heritage Collection’, in order to give visitors a taste of its treasures, both Australian and non-Australian. The State Library of South Australia followed suit in 2003 when it created a Treasures Wall containing another small changing display of objects from its collection. The State Library of Victoria went much further in 2004, when it opened a much bigger display focused on Victoria, located high in the dome of its original reading room.
Notes
1. Robert Hughes, ‘Foreword', to Anne Robertson, Treasures of the State Library of New South Wales: The Australiana Collections, Sydney: Collins, 1988, p. viii.
