AARL

Exhibition review

Linda Young
University of Canberra

'Treasures from the World's Great Libraries' National Library of Australia

Treasures of the world have come to Canberra, the National Library proclaimed, and treasures it indubitably offered. It proved necessary to time your visit early in the day to minimise a wait in the admission queue, for the advertising did not undersell this exhibition and visitors poured in.

Treasures, it seems, are exactly what the public wants to see. This observation raises the question: what is a treasure? Medieval sacred books embellished with miniature paintings and gold leaf are clearly precious. But what gives treasure quality to the manuscript of a scientific formula, a word list of an obscure African language, a 1939 phone directory? The answers are more in the mind than inherent in the material.

It's easy to say that a treasure is something valuable, but we measure value with many criteria. The almighty dollar is a handy unit of value, yet not all treasures have a commercial value and some are beyond it. Rarity often defines treasures, expressed in originality, primacy and antiquity. Rarity can also be expressed in connection with a person, event or place. Yet constructing such a system of classification fails to produce a viable checklist of treasure status. In fact, it demonstrates again that the ascription of 'treasure' depends on someone articulating why the object is significant in a certain context.

All this is to say that we each decide what is a treasure. We may share some decisions, and wonder at others. In this field, 'Treasures from the World's Great Libraries' surely satisfied, but seemed likely also to provoke, and thus to extend our ideas about the significance of things.

Every Janeite will quietly adore the small pages of Miss Austen's manuscript of 'Sense and Sensibility.' Most Australians will quiver over the pages of Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter, his manifesto of injustice. If you have a musical bone in your body, you will be thrilled by music written in the hand of Beethoven. The emotional quality of these responses suggests how personal is the idea of a treasure. People to whom I spoke nominated as their special thrill a second century fragment of the Iliad, a hand-written report by the doctor who attended the death of Abraham Lincoln, and a 10th century Arabic translation of a treatise by Euclid.

And so the exhibition went on, wonderful item upon item. It was living proof of the power of the Real Thing, the root of why societies sustain heritage collections. To be in the presence of these things connects us to the places, times and events that shaped the history of human culture.

This certainly raises big themes, and in fact, the exhibition was so diverse that amazing objects overwhelmed much sense of purpose or unity among them. One damn treasure after another, as Groucho Marx (who has a letter in the show) might have said.

It was almost a supermarket display of treasures. Yet this somewhat dubious character could perhaps have been the great strength of 'Treasures from the World's Great Libraries'. Every visitor made his or her own choices about which pieces inspired, and which did not. Educators see this as the basis of 'constructivist' learning, where individuals select what is relevant to their experience and bolt it onto their own structures of understanding.

In this scenario, libraries and museums are the great warehouses of ideas where people browse for the raw materials to build dreams and more earthly products-the hardware shops of do-it-yourself intellectual bricolage. The beautiful, the ingenious, the bizarre, can be understood in their own contexts, or can be deconstructed for recycling into unexpected solutions.

It's impossible to foretell how people, now and in the future, will put the stock of ideas to use. But it is certain that both library researchers and museum strollers will have 'Eureka!' moments as a consequence of their contact with items such as those displayed in 'Treasures.' That is why it is so important for societies to continue to maintain and develop repositories of cultural heritage, even if they do not seem to be generating revenue or covering their own costs.

'Treasures from the World's Great Libraries' represented the tip of the iceberg of visual, literary, scientific and fantastic resources that humanity has crafted over thousands of years. It was a graceful tribute to the centenary of the National Library by its fellow institutions, and an inspiration to us all.

Treasures breaks all exhibition records

There has never been another public event for the NLA like the Treasures Exhibition. It attracted over 115 000 visitors, more than doubling the previous best attendances of about 43 000 for The World Upside Down and Paradise Possessed by the time it closed on 24 February. Comments in the visitors' book indicate a high level of public satisfaction with its design and execution.

Margaret Dent, the curator, has expressed delight at the cooperation and enthusiasm that the library experienced in its dealings with lending institutions. The NLA invited the participation of about 30 national libraries around the world, and the response was overwhelming.