The Role of Libraries in Shaping the Humanities: Australia in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

Libraries have long been crucial institutions for the humanities. However, rarely have humanities scholars reflected on how central libraries have historically been to their research and scholarship. As digitization of library and archival materials accelerate, it is timely that humanities scholars reflect more substantially on the roles of these institutions. This article starts from the premise that humanities scholarship is a networked activity in which libraries, universities, and a range of other institutions play crucial but changing roles in sustaining this work. To explore this argument, two major research libraries in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s are discussed—the Mitchell Library, located in the heart of Sydney, and the National Library of Australia, located in the capital Canberra. With both libraries occupying iconic buildings erected in very different eras, they presented themselves physically as worthy of their claim to national leadership. Their status as well as the actual physical spaces of the libraries played significant roles in shaping how humanities research was conducted within them in this period as well as the scholarly persona of those undertaking this research. Similarly, the seemingly quotidian practices of such libraries were central to molding modern research cultures of the Australian humanities. The practices of collection management and acquisition in the 1950s and 1960s were crucial to the formation of particular fields of study and to their growing prominence in Australia.