The Australian Library Journal
Volume 53 Nš1 February 2004
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W Boyd Rayward
Margaret Trask
Gerard Brennan
Margaret Trask was a great benefactor to her profession, her University and her friends. Librarianship and information studies were advanced by her insights and her innovative teaching. She captured the minds of a generation of students and converted staff colleagues into enthusiastic disciples. Intellectual disciplines are best practiced by those whose thinking is orderly and precise, who do not equivocate and who manifest an informed enthusiasm for their subject. Margaret had all these qualities but she also had a capacity for friendship which made her leadership a joy to her fellows.
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Oh Margaret, would you be able to...?
Tony Blake
I feel very privileged to have been asked to offer a few words of reminiscence about my association with Margaret Trask. My first contact with Margaret was shortly after I commenced as principal of the Kuring-gai College of Advanced Education in 1988. Margaret had been very influential in the early development of the institution. Although she had retired from her position there by the time I arrived, she remained a most admired and respected figure. One of the first things that I discovered about her was that she had a reputation for speaking her mind; something I was subsequently able to confirm empirically and for which I had great admiration.
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Margaret Trask, AM
John Levett
Like most of us, Margaret had two lives: a private, and a public one. Margaret revealed her inner self to few; but her public life is a matter of record. What follows is a broad outline of her career in order to give some background to the more detailed contributions which make up the body of this special issue. Quotations (unless otherwise indicated) are from other contributions herein.
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Enduring ideas: the contribution of Margaret Trask to education for the profession
Mairéad Browne and Joyce Kirk
This article acknowledges and celebrates the contribution of Margaret Trask to education for beginning professionals in library and information work. It identifies four concepts or themes which underpinned the award courses developed and taught under Margaret's leadership, and examines how these themes have evolved over thirty years. Margaret played a leading role at a time when education for librarianship was in its early phase of development in Australia. She came to prominence in the 1970s when responsibility for provision was moving from the professional association, the then Library Association of Australia (LAA), to universities and colleges of advanced education, a move that had taken place already in the United Kingdom.
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IFLA and professional ethics
Alex Byrne
Some thoughtful individuals have recognised a need to go beyond the traditional ethical concerns of professions. This paper explores some of the ethical dimensions of modern librarianship by considering the establishment of the Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) initiative by IFLA. It acknowledges that the extension of traditionally accepted professional boundaries will have significant consequences for the profession.
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Four decades of library automation: recollections and reflections
Hans W Groenewegen
The author reflects on some of the events and personalities which have had an impact on library automation in Australia. No attempt to take stock of developments in Australian librarianship during the course of Margaret Trask's long professional life could neglect this fundamental area. And of course, among those mentioned in the survey which follows are colleagues of Margaret's and others on whose professional lives she exerted a great influence by her example, by her teaching and by her approach to professional development, for example, in AIMA. She inspired them to take risks and to lead.
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Valuing libraries
Ian mcCallum and Sherrey Quinn
This paper is a selective review of recent publications, focused on the economic value of public and special libraries which are treated separately, since context and organisational objectives differ widely for different types of libraries. Those who wish to further explore this topic will find many studies into the social value of libraries which establish their general 'worth.' A good place to start is Roswitha Poll's examination of ways of assessing economic value, social value, and outcomes for literacy, information retrieval, and academic and professional success (Poll 2003). An extensive bibliography of earlier work is given in Fitch and Warner (1997). Promising methods of evaluating the economic benefits of libraries and expressing them in financial terms are at last emerging.
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School libraries in Australia
Maureen Nimon
Yearbook Australia 2003 reports that in August 2001 there were 9596 schools in Australia (2003:305). It can be claimed with confidence that each of these has a library and that a member or members of the school staff have specific responsibility for its operation. That this is so is primarily an achievement of the Library Association of Australia (LAA), the predecessor of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and subsequently of ALIA itself and other professional groups such as the Australian School Library Association (ASLA). However, while ASLA and state-based teacher librarian professional groups have played their part in the development of school libraries and their staffing their existence can be attributed the LAA campaign of the 1960s aimed at increasing the presence of libraries in schools.
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Researching Australian children's literature
Maurice Saxby
When in 1962 I began to research the history of Australian children's literature, access to the primary sources was limited and difficult. From a catalogue drawer in the Mitchell Library of hand-written cards marked 'Children's books' I could call up from the stacks, in alphabetical order, piles of early publications. My notes about the books were filed by date of publication - where given - so that a historical perspective began to emerge. The National Library yielded further data, but extracting it was more difficult. There was no catalogue and the library's fiction holdings were housed in what had been a wartime hut. No attempt had been made to differentiate the implied reader: child or adult. But the staff members were helpful and friendly and I was provided with a desk and a chair. Morning and afternoon tea with biscuits came around on a trolley and cost just one penny. The Victorian State Library held a rare books collection under the charge of Margaret Ingham, and I was given access direct to the shelves. Apart from these three collections there was little else available to the scholar.
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Glory days? Reflections on the 1988 Australian Libraries Summit and its aftermaths
Eric Wainwright
By the 24th Biennial Conference of the Library Association of Australia (LAA) in Darwin in July 1986, Warren Horton had been in office as director-general of the National Library of Australia (NLA) for just over one year. In an impressively wide-ranging speech to the conference, Horton re-examined the National Library of Australia's roles and relationships.
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Margaret Trask: a bibliography
David J Jones
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