Larissa Behrendt:

Good evening, friends. My name is Larissa Behrendt and I'm the chair of the National Library Council. I'd like to begin tonight by acknowledging the traditional custodians on this land, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, and through them, all First Nations and Torres Strait Islander peoples. For tens of thousands of years, stories, song, culture, knowledge, and traditions have flowed across this country, and they continue to do so today. It is with a mixture of great joy, but also sadness that I stand here tonight. Joy, because I'm thrilled to be here, honouring the career, the passion and the legacy of Dr. Marie-Louise Ayres, whose tireless work, both in this library and across the wider sector, has made such a marked difference to the way libraries are perceived and valued by the public and by the government. But of course, it is also with sadness, as I think many of you like myself, hope that Marie-Louise would choose to work forever and continue in the role of director general ad infinitum.

But the old adage that all good things must come to an end is true, and no one here tonight could deny that Marie-Louise has more than earned her retirement, which will no doubt be filled with travel, reading, adventure, and time with her beloved Russell and family. Marie-Louise may not be tall, but she is certainly mighty. And trust me, I've seen her in the boardroom and she has packed much in her 32-year library career. After completing her PhD in Australian literature at the Australian National University, Dr. Marie-Louise Ayres worked in research libraries before joining the National Library in 2002. Over the next 15 years, she held several senior positions, building collections, improving digital access, in particular the development and expansion of the online archive Trove, which I'm sure you'll agree is a national treasure above all others, and other national services across multiple branches.

She was appointed Director General in March 2017, and under her leadership, the Library has undergone significant transformation, strengthening its national and international standing, and deepening its commitment to connecting all Australians with their national collections. Her tenure has not simply been about stewardship of collections, though she's been an extraordinary guardian of them. It's been about positioning the National Library of Australia as a confident, contemporary national institution, digitally ambitious, publicly engaged, intellectually rigorous, and unafraid to evolve. She has led through complexities, funding challenges, technological transformation, and the pressures that come with being a national cultural institution in changing times. Under her guidance, the Library has strengthened its foundations while expanding its reach. On top of all of this, Marie-Louise is also the Director of the National and State Libraries Australasia, or NSLA, having previously been a leader and participant in many NSLA projects, including the National E-Deposit Service.

She's also the chair of the Conference of Directors of the National Libraries and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Personally, Marie-Louise has also been a wonderful support to me, offering wisdom, guidance, a friendly check-in, and always a smile. I cannot overstate how much I've valued her experience, her wisdom, and her friendship over my time as council chair, and I do wish that we had the chance to work together for a longer period. She always played with a straight bat, was the picture of professionalism, and it was always evident how much she loves this institution, its staff, and the public that use it. It's now my great pleasure to welcome for her final formal address as Director General of the National Library of Australia, Dr. Marie-Louise Ayres.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

Thanks, Larissa. And thank you for those of us joining us tonight, either on this Ngunnawal land or from the many, many nations that we have on this continent. All of us who work in memory institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums, are in the debt of those who have held, built, and cherished culture for those many generations on this land. And I also wanted particularly to acknowledge the debt that I owe to First Nations peoples working in our cultural institutions, and the generosity shown to those of us still taking baby steps in our understanding of both the enduring strength of First Nations cultures and the generational reverberations of dispossession, sundered families, and systemic discrimination. I've had many opportunities in the past to talk about very special collections, about the people who use them, the new knowledge and creative works that result about the systems of thought and technology that we use to collect, to make meaningful and accessible, and to preserve documentary heritage.

And if I'm a little hoarse tonight, and I am, I've got hot water here, it's because there've been many opportunities in the last couple of weeks to talk about these things. So tonight and after 32 years in the profession, 24 in this institution and nine as Director General, I'd like to take a bit of a different tack and consider some of the values and qualities that underpin the work of the National Library of Australia, the Australian Library community, and the international library community more broadly, because it is these values, these principles, these qualities that create the cultural asset that makes all the other work possible. So this will be a reflection in six chapters and an epilogue, and I've had to cut a footnote or two. Chapter one, tenacity or sticking at things. In 1948, the National Library of Australia commenced a bold and forward thinking project, utilising new technologies to make material relating to Australia more accessible to the Australian public.

But as with almost everything we look at in relation to current value provided by the national and Australia's other great libraries, this project did not come out of nowhere. It had predecessors. Volume one, part one of the historical records of New South Wales was published in 1893 with the explicit aim of affording the fullest possible informational or obtainable about the foundation progress and government of the mother colony of New South Wales. The first volume of Frederick Watson's historical records of Australia was published in 1914 under the ages of the then Commonwealth Parliamentary Library. Selections of Australian documents continued to be published even a hundred years later, including John Thompson's 2010 documents that shaped Australia. Now, I've had the pleasure of reading the very earliest correspondence and handwritten notes that set out the ambition behind the project I have in mind. Now, it is either the case that in May 1939, W.H.

Ifould of what is now the State Library of New South Wales and Kenneth Binns, then National Librarian, simultaneously came up with the idea of microfilming records held in Britain and relating to Australia, or that they were jocking to claim primacy around the idea, and both may have been true. But of course, a devastating war intervened, and it was not until 1948 that this germ of an idea turned into something concrete. The Australian Joint Copying Project, or as we shorthanded, the AJCP, is part of a tradition championed that of ensuring documents important to Australian history are readily available for researchers. Now, I'm not proposing a history of the AJCP here, although with the benefit of hindsight, this project could certainly have merited a chapter in remarkable occurrences, the handsome 2001 volume published to mark the library's first 100 years. Because the decision to commence this project in 1948, only a few years after the decimations of World War II, and less than 10 years since the new technology of microfilm was applied to library collections was indeed remarkable.

What is even more remarkable is that this project continued until 1997, just shy of 50 years, for some of that time in partnership with state libraries and the National Library of New Zealand, for much of it stuck at by the National Library of Australia. Historians here in the room and online know that the AJCP meant that microfilmed copies of archives held by the UK public records office and personal business and organisational archives held in other records offices and private homes were available in reading rooms here in Australia. Now, I'd ask you to consider what it must have taken for the National Library to stick up this project for half a century with so many other calls on its time and resources. For Directors General, executive staff, and the council of the Library and its predecessor committees to stick with this. To give us the result that we had by the end of the millennium, 10,419 microfilm reels capturing records dating from 1560 to 1984, described in 11 handbooks, 500 finding aids, which of course in those days were simply typed documents and many catalogue records, indexes plus microfilm, the very height of searchability at that time.

Now, we kept sticking at it and in the digital era, we knew we could do more with all of this magnificent description and potentially with the film. I had the privilege of working with the late Judith Pearce when the first incarnation of the encoded archival description standard was released. We developed a viable proposal to convert those handbooks and finding aids into searchable text. Three budget years in a row, we came so close to winning internal funding to commence that project. Three budget years in a row, I broke my heart when higher priorities pipped us at the post. But we did not lose sight of the potential to mark this incredible investment, to make this investment more useful and we did not give up. In 2007, we started digitising newspaper from microfilm and working with vendors and clever business analysts, developers, and interface designers to make newspapers searchable at the text level and comprehensible at the page, article, and paragraph level.

And eventually, the AJCP's time came. Between 2017 and 2020, we converted those 10,000 plus reels of microfilm to online images with assistance from the then coalition's modernisation fund. The project digitised 8.2 million microfilm images, converted over 10,000 pages of descriptive text and at last delivered online access to material previously only available onsite through library reading rooms, but we are not done. Right from the beginning of my career, I knew that one day we'd find a way to make handwritten manuscripts both online and searchable. Digitising to create images of manuscripts collections is, at the image level, relatively simple, but digitisation of manuscripts collections is anything but, these wild and unruly collections where every folder might yield new material types and sizes and 50 new rights holders is not easy. Still, we've finally been able to digitise even very large manuscripts collections, such as those of Sir Robert Menzies and General Sir John Monash in a way that does not damage originals, that retains the essential meaning of the archive efficiently and at scale.

Over the last couple of years, we've applied handwritten text recognition, and here's another acronym for you, HTR, an AI assisted technology across these private archives held on our shelves here in this building. We applied the technology to all newly digitised manuscripts. We have applied it retrospectively to those we digitised from paper before HTI became available. Like newspapers and journals, this renders even complex scrolls searchable. Like newspapers, it is not perfect, and like newspapers, you, the public can edit the searchable text when you have an image of manuscript in front of you and can discern what the machine cannot. And next, well, of course, we are now preparing to apply this technology across those 8.2 million images created on microfilm between 1948 and 1997. And I expect that sometime around 2028, 80 years after this project commenced, Australians will be able to find and navigate searchable text of a huge body of content about Australia held in UK archives, Binns and White and Ifould would I believe be astounded and delighted.

Now, obviously this project and its predecessor historical records publications have origins steeped in colonialism, not just the actual colonialism, that records relating to Australia's people, government, society, and economy were created by a colonial power, by colonial appointees and taken back to the mother country, but also colonialism in an approach which saw finding and making documents from first settlement as equating to Australian history. This project commenced decades before any serious consideration of the absolute rightness of considering Australia's pre-settlement history as part of our collective story, or including the histories passed down in voice, song, language, thought patterns, and art through countless generations. It is such a partial way of thinking about our nation's history, but it's colonialism and its blinkered consideration of what constitutes history and its recording of systems of power that caused untold harm to remarkable, rich, durable, and innovative cultures does not obviate its value as historical source, and nor does it obviate the point of my story, which is that a great library, a national library, sticks at things and finds new ways to create value from past investments.

It brings new life into collections and projects in ways the originators could never have foreseen. And even at this point, we cannot really see what further value might be made from this amazing foresight and this 50-year commitment to making the AJCP happen.

Chapter two, Working Together. I've just had the pleasure of spending a week in Wellington, New Zealand. This is why my voice is gone, I've talked for a week. Working with national and international colleagues on issues where we know we can think and rethink better together, uplift better together, build capability and infrastructure better together, where we can test ethical questions better together, share our collections and services better. This working together is one of the hallmarks of the National Library itself, an amazing feature of the Australian library community. As I've said many times, the depth, breadth, durability, and consistency of cooperation and collaboration in the Australian library community are almost unique in the international stage. I think of this as very, very Australian, having a go, open to all, finding practical solutions to our reality as a small population scattered across a very large continent. I'd like to reflect on some of the things that Australians enjoy because we as libraries have been deeply committed to collaboration as our first impulse.

Yes, we compete sometimes, but we are not aiming to be the bigger, better, richer, better known than each other. We don't put leaders like me onto pedestals. We often describe Australian libraries as hiding in plain sight, doing great work without needing lots of accolades, and we are always looking at ways that we can deliver more and better to Australians. Trove is an obvious example. Yes, the infrastructure that Trove runs on is here right in this building. Yes, most of the technical capability that is built and developed that infrastructure has been here in this institution. Yes, the funding for running the public side of that infrastructure, the front facing Trove, comes from the Commonwealth with the Australian Government committing ongoing and indexed funding from July 2024, some 15 years after Trove fundamentally reshaped what it is possible for Australians to learn about their own history. But Trove simply would not exist if decades of deep and committed collaboration across the Australian library community was less strong than it has been.

If we had not started sharing metadata, descriptions of our collections more than four decades ago, Australian libraries would not have been able to build one of the most efficient national systems in the world. Without 50 plus years of National and State Libraries Australasia members working together across all aspects of our business, our offerings would have been much thinner. If we had not decided together to build a single service for archiving Australian websites, Australians would not have the simply amazing full tech search service that we have now encompassing 30 years of Australian discourse in the web domain. If we had not had each of the Australian members of that group, the states and territories committed over decades to microforming newspapers from their jurisdictions, we would almost certainly not have had Trove newspapers. If we had not decided that building a single shared service to collect Australian electronic publications under national, state and territory legal deposit laws, all, of course, slightly different, then we would not have the consolidated view we now have of the Australian digital publishing world.

If we had not as a nation established the ATSE Learn principles in 1995, the first set of principles for how Australian libraries held themselves to account for how we engage with First Nations knowledges, communities, and colleagues. If we had not worked over several years to persuade colleagues at the Library of Congress to move from a single subject heading Australian Languages to using the AIATSIS language thesaurus to describe resources, if we had not all, all libraries in this country committed not just to using these new rich descriptors, but to using our scarce resources to go back and recatalog our collections with the result that Trove and most Australian library systems can now be searched by hundreds of Indigenous language names and their variants. If we had not collaborated across the entire Australian library field in 2023 to produce guidelines for First Nations collections description, if we had not from 2023 onwards, united as a library field to resist the scourge of attempted book bans, equipping our public librarians in particular to deal with challenges, to understand their legal rights and to understand the legal underpinnings of public library funding.

If we had not worked for decades to achieve modest and necessary changes to Australia's copyright laws, if we had not started thinking together about ethical application of new technologies such as AI, if, if, if. When these ways of working together have been in place for decades, we tend to believe that the Australian library system, and as we know it, and experiences was inevitable, it was not. It's the hard, long, and sometimes frustrating work over years and decades of working together that has delivered us a uniquely strong, interconnected, and incredibly efficient Australian library system. There are nearly 1,700 public library service points in this country, and we are investing in them in this country. Around one third of Australians are members of their public libraries. They visit an average of seven times a year, and that's not counting people like me who borrow digitally, but don't have time to pop into my local library.

This is an amazing piece of social infrastructure, hiding almost in plain sight, a glue that provides our communities with information, with pleasure and inspiration, with opportunities to meet, talk with, and hear from like and unlike-minded people to work, to find respite from heat, cold, loneliness, or overcrowding. I'm really delighted that our colleagues in the Office for Social Cohesion in the Department of Home Affairs have recognised this amazing network and have provided grants to many public and some university libraries who all know their communities really well and had ideas for how they might encourage more sharing, more opportunities for different parts of the community to come together, more sense of communal citizenship. I wish all of them well in these small scale experiments that are about focusing on what binds rather than what divides us. Chapter three, Courage and Caution. Courage is required in our work.

The courage to do what we think is right based on decades of professional practise and thought, and most especially the courage to know when we have to completely rethink what we thought we knew. For me and for many of my colleagues, the most important example of this in recent times is having to unlearn what we think we know about some of our collections, about who owns the knowledge in these collections and about how we consider our stewardship role. I'm speaking here about the work that has occurred across the cultural sector, including the library sector, about what we refer to as indigenous cultural and intellectual property or ISIP. I've worked with collections for my whole career. I've always understood copyright and for my sins I've spent a lot of time working across our sector on copyright law. As a manuscript curator, I've worked in areas of complex access conditions and had many discussions with those depositing personal archives about the ethics of creating, including materials that were created by others, letters, draughts of book chapters, et cetera.

I was around when the very first encoding of moral rights came into our law. So in many ways, shifting to think about the special and complex sets of rights that pertain to First Nations knowledge embedded in our collections, knowledges about languages, about cultural practises, about kinship systems, about uses of plants and other natural materials. This is not such a huge one, but it has meant that many of us have had to shift our understanding of exactly who should be consulted when we or our users want to use materials that we steward. This has taken individual, institutional and system-wide courage. Here at the National Library of Australia, we are two and a half years into implementing our ISIP protocol. We are still learning and adjusting. We now have an understanding of the scope of this work across many of our areas of practise and can see that we need to systematise this work to make it as efficient as possible.

We will make mistakes. We will frustrate some researchers who've worked with these materials in good faith over long periods. And we also know that many researchers who are observing our protocol, who are seeking community views or permissions to use these incredibly precious records are finding that their own research is enriched through this deep engagement. We made this move ahead of the planned standalone legislation addressing Indigenous cultural and intellectual property. We've been first in the library space. It has been uncomfortable at times. We know there is much, much more work to do here. We share our knowledge, our experience with other libraries, because as a national library, that's one of the things that we can do, take deep breaths and move ahead with courage, clearing the path for others to follow as and when they can. But if courage is essential, so at times is caution, there are times when we do not move as quickly as communities might like us to, because we need to think very carefully about how we go about our work.

I could give you many examples. One more than 15 years old now saw our conservators testing the hypothesis that we could relax our previously very tight temperature and humidity standards, and in doing so, reduce our use of power. This was not a decision to take lightly as we need to ensure our collections are kept safe for hundreds of years. We systematically collect data across our stacks to gather the evidence that confirmed that our collection, much of it paper-based and therefore with huge thermal mass, could indeed stay safe within really much more relaxed standards. Right now, the biggest area that we need to exercise caution is in the world of artificial intelligence. Yes, we could have dived right in a few years ago and used a bunch of available tools that could have achieved new and cool outcomes, but as stewards of this amazing collection, stewards of others words, lives, art, creativity, cultural and intellectual property, we needed to pause.

We thought deeply across the organisation and beyond to establish our AI framework. We have a firm governance process so that each idea for applying AI is tested by a group of people from across the library. We need to consider not only what good might come of one of these applications, but what harm might be caused. We work with the best of the Australian research community and with colleagues across the cultural sector to make the best decisions we can to use technology for good. I began my career at the advent of the internet age, and I think back to the optimism we all had about the potential of this new technology to really improve the lives of the world's citizens. I'm a born optimist, but I will confess that I do not feel the same optimism about this next technological age, not because I can't see the incredible good it can do, but because much of the power is in the hands of those I do not believe have public good at the centre of their thinking, because I think that there are legitimate questions to ask about how much of the world's energy and water should be used to power these technologies, and because already in addition to amazing advances, we've seen huge societal harm.

So if we and libraries are thinking carefully about our responsibilities in this area are in a little slower than so I would like us to be then so be it. Chapter four, inspired. No, I don't mean that we are inspiring. For those of us working here at the National Library or in our state, territory, university and public libraries, you, the reading, writing, thinking, inquiring, conversing, curious, demand in public, you inspire us. Every Australian writer whose books flow into our collection, we see and value you. Every journalist, every editor of a journal or a newspaper, we see you. Every map maker, documentary photographer, portraitist, oral historian, we thank you for your craft and for entrusting your work to us. Every reader from the tiniest to the oldest, your love of stories, of information of poetry, you inspire us. We love to hear your stories of what you are reading, what reading means to you, whether you read in print on an e-reader or via audio books because we love reading too.

Every creator, every poet or novelist or playwright or scriptwriter struggling with the lonely and not particularly lucrative vocation of creating fictional or poetic works to help us to see our world differently or to escape from it to a while or to engage with it. We know that you love to write in libraries. We know that making it as easy as possible for you to search out the texture that adds richness and depth to your works, especially those set in our own past, have made many of your works better. And every researcher, your endless curiosity, your uncanny ability to hunt down little used collections and put them to work, or to look anew at heavily used collections, creating new windows into the possible, you inspire us. I've had the privilege of being involved with the Library's Fellowships and Scholarships Programme for well over 20 years, including chairing in this role.

And every year, I read through applications dumbfounded at the curiosity, the tenacity of the research community. Collections I'd never heard of after a quarter of a century here, finally being put to use and many times where I sat and thought, "You plan to do what with that collection that I thought I knew inside out. " Every individual pursuing family history, every community telling their story of their town, and especially every First Nations community using our collections and those across the country to awaken or strengthen languages, to trace the histories, to reconnect kin, sundered by past government policies, to tell the stories of your elders, your statesmen and women, your warriors and your survivors, you inspire us. So I hope that you know that this deep sense of being inspired by what you do is true and is at the heart of what we do and really it drives us our commitment to service and that when we have to make decisions as we do, that might mean that we do not live up to your expectations or that your area of inquiry is not as well covered as you would like it to be.

Please know that we make these decisions so, so carefully. There've been many times in the library's past when these decisions have been made with care, times when we've intentionally moved to serving the many rather than the few, the underserved rather than the already pretty well served. Long before my time at the library, my predecessors made decisions to reduce overseas collecting in order to focus more on Australia and to be able to shift investment into the new digital world they could see coming. In my own time as director general, we've shifted to a digital preferred collecting model and yes, there are inevitable worries about this. We know that the physical artefact of the book is important. We know that many readers prefer a physical book, but making that change means we can and do collect more, more broadly, that we've been able to slash the time from publication to availability in our reading rooms and that our physical storage, expensive infrastructure that we have to plan years ahead for will last longer.

In my own time, we made the decision to reduce our Asian collecting. We still have an office in Indonesia. We still collect from China. We collect across the Pacific. But when I looked at what decades of statistics were telling us that our investment in Asian collecting dwarfed actual use of that collection and that use of the collection was by a highly engaged, skilled, but narrow subsection of the research community, I knew that we needed to choose differently. There is no doubt that some scholars have been disadvantaged by our decisions. Many will have other avenues to gain access to the information they need. Some will not. We simply cannot support every area of inquiry of every Australian researcher. But the flip side of these decisions is that we are doing a much better job at collecting Australia, and we are the only country that will do this work.

This is our story. We and many of our sister libraries have intentionally increased our engagement within collecting our First Nations voices, voices seriously underrepresented in our 19th and 20th century collections. At the last few years, we've had intentional engagement with various multicultural communities, and that's really added many, many experiences to the collection that will be used for decades ahead. We've enriched our sense of who we are as Australians and what has changed as we've moved to a nation where half of us were born overseas or our parents were, and a quarter of us speak a language other than English at home. And we've made the hard decisions that mean we have robust, sustainable, and secure digital infrastructure that serves millions across and beyond this country, not just those with the time, the economic privilege, and the confidence to enter our beautiful, but sometimes intimidating building.

Chapter five, Steadying Ourselves. Institutions such as ours do face tough times, let's call them headwinds or unquiet waters or shaky ground from time to time. Sometimes, indeed, often we face tight or tightening budgets. I'm happy to say that in 2026, our funding is secure, stable, and while we could always do more with more, it is sufficient to allow us to do our work well. We quite literally deal with weather. Here in this institution in January 2020, we experienced a catastrophic hailstorm that punched tens of thousands of holes into our heritage copper roof, exposing some of our most important collections to the risk of water damage and requiring a multi-year, multi-stage and very much multimillion dollar replacement of our entire roof. We deal with changing political weather, and as public servants, we serve the government of the day and navigate the tyres sometimes loose, sometimes tighter, between current day political imperatives and what the National Library of Australia Act of 1960 sets out as our purposes.

In more recent years, we face new threats. As an organisation with a very large digital footprint, ensuring our digital estate, our digital data, our digital collections can be protected against cyber attacks has occupied much of our thinking and a significant portion of our available resources. It is certainly the case that we need to invest a larger and larger proportion of our budget to this task, squeezing the potential for innovation, but this is not a risk that we can ignore. We must meet it head on and divert investment, not just win, but before it's required. We have seen what has happened when other major cultural organisations such as the British Library are under prepared for cyber attacks and how the damage done to collections, to infrastructure, to internal culture, and most importantly to public trust ripples on for years and far beyond the digital realm.

Over the last couple of years, as cultural institutions and other cultural infrastructures such as festivals have become lightning rods in an increasingly divided, angry and uncivil society, I've watched, learned, worked with colleagues and with the Libraries Council to adapt and adjust to new risks as we've tread the delicate balance between rights and responsibilities. We have seen behaviours we never expected to see in library spaces, whether they are physical or digital. We have seen staff in public libraries abused for upholding the right to read freely, threatened, doxed, called evil. We have seen tsunamis of vile commentary on our social media channels, which we use in good faith to inform our communities about the collections we hold, the services we can offer them, and the value they can gain in availing themselves of social infrastructure that belongs to them all. We have seen angry, simplistic, and knee-jerk responses to measured thinking by libraries about how best to fulfil our roles in difficult times.

We have seen asymmetry of opportunity to speak. As public servants, we accept that our speech is constrained in service to the essential concept that public servants must speak and act in ways that ensure public trust, and that even in very contentious arenas, we try to set our own views aside and be as impartial as possible. I have, quite frankly, been disappointed multiple times in recent years at what can only be described as pile-ons via media and social media. I've been disappointed that some of the people from whom I expect the most subtle and considered thinking, from whom I expect weighing up of views and evidence, the thinkers and writers whose work I admire, whose craft I honour and whose independence I uphold have indulged in responses that are not subtle, that are not considered. Now, we at the National Library have experienced some of this, but we've certainly not been at the worst of the receiving end, but I grieve for colleagues who have been, colleagues who've worked for decades to open their libraries to more indifferent audiences.

Colleagues have worked so hard to support First Nations communities and artists, colleagues who've had to call a pause while they work out whether they have done everything needed to comply with societal expectations and legal requirements to safeguard visitors and staff and especially young people. A common thread in these experiences that nobody has picked up the phone, literally or metaphorically to ask why. Instead, we see members of our community reaching first for the social media megaphone with its fast sugar hit of outrage sharing. I make these points not to say, "Never question what libraries do" or to assert that we naturally occur some kind of moral high ground. We do not. As institutions, we deserve to and benefit from having our assumptions and actions tested. But to say, if you see or hear something you do not like or do not understand or you think we may not have considered the impact of our decisions, please engage respectfully with us.

Ask us why. Test whether we have fully thought things through. Consider what legal obligations we might have. Consider our governance arrangements. In most libraries, we are not free agents. We are responsible to bodies that have been tasked with overseeing our work. And when we make major decisions, these will have been carefully considered by those governing bodies. Consider what our relative responsibilities might be to the researchers of today and tomorrow, to communities near and far, to those already well served in our institutions and those who deserve better service. And then please engage in the civil discourse that we work so hard to nurture in and beyond our walls. The loss of trust caused by unconsidered outrage can take months or even decades to repair. If you shout at us, whether via social or traditional media or on our lawns or front steps, remember that you are taking advantage of the fact that as public servants and that is what we are wherever we work in the library sector, we cannot shout back.

We risk losing really good people from our cultural world if their love of what they do, their belief in its value, their capacity to make decisions is killed through the experience of being beleaguered by the very people whose books we collect, whose research, we support through our reading rooms, our reference services, our digital platforms, our fundraising, our long-term planning, our purposeful activity, and whose voices we share in our public programmes. We believe in civil discourse. We believe in freedom to read. We believe in freedom to speak. We also uphold the law and we know that free speech is not unfettered in this country. It is moderated by law, by norms of civil discourse, and by the need to engage respectfully, even with those with whom we do not agree. And you can be assured that as a strongly connected library field, we work together to adapt to these change realities.

No librarian in Australia works alone. Chapter six, human values applied for human goal at good, or it's the people stupid. I've used we often in this talk, and that's because the we that is the national library, that is the Australian library profession, that is the international community is always, always about people. Yes, we use technologies and we focus on using them for good. We're not interested in commercial returns. We believe in the economic, moral and cultural rights of creators and are poor profiteering from the intellectual work of others. We think deeply about what our responsibilities are to the collections and traditions we steward, to the community we serve today, and to the communities who we hope in 20 or 50 or 100 years time will be served by the decisions we make now. Here at the National Library, we talk about collecting today what will be important tomorrow, and there are no shore bets on this.

We work collectively, intelligently, within a framework of legislation, regulations, and professional codes to make the best decisions we can in any given circumstances. I've often described our work as like planting forests. We assess the landscape, the soil. We make educated predictions about the future climate. We dig, we plant, we care for, and ultimately, at least in memory institutions like this one, we are collecting for future generations for those who will come long after we depart this beautiful earth. This is what drives the people who work in libraries, all of them. It's a shared sense of mission, and it does not matter whether you're in a collecting role or provide a reference service, or keep the service running, or do the corporate work that's required to make the best, the most ethical decisions about how we apply our resources. This is what drives our people. It is certainly what has driven to me, driven me.

Epilogue, and the greatest of these is love. So 32 years after I accidentally fell into the library profession, one that has sustained me, fascinated me, driven me, captivated me. I'd like to have the opportunity to reflect on what it is like to leave the profession, and especially our magnificent National Library of Australia after nearly a quarter of a century. There are, as my grand daughter would say, some big feelings. But if I step back for a moment, I know that I'm leaving the Library at a time when we have strong policy foundations in the form of the national cultural policy. When the Library's physical and digital infrastructure needs are well understood and funded, when the Library's council is forward looking and like previous councils, encourages us to be the best national library we can possibly be. When the Library has a strong executive team, which I know will support incoming Director General, Alison Dellit, just as they supported me, when the depth of talent in this organisation is a joy and a huge comfort, when our partners, the thousand or so organisations who work with us to provide content through Trove or deliver high quality programme, trust us and hold us accountable at the same time, when we have never reached more Australians or been more valuable to more people or to a more diverse Australia, when we know that what we do matters, that it improves the lives of our fellow citizens, that we create value that we may never know about, but makes us all the richer anyway.

I leave knowing that this is the right time for me to go, knowing that my time for carrying our National Library has come to an end and it's time to pass stewardship to others, still feeling joy every single day that I walk in the Library's doors and with my heart filled with love, love for all those who've gone before us, building the collections, developing the services, making the brave decisions, exercising the foresight that has brought us to this point, love for the Library's collections, for its beautiful building, for its power to create connection, for all those who work with us to make better library services for all Australians, for all those who support us giving to the Australian community through the Library, for its culture, the precious ineftable thing that is an asset just as surely as buildings and collections and digital infrastructure assets and needs to be nurtured, tendered, maintained, occasionally renovated, grown along with all the other assets that make our work possible for its wild beauty.

It's love. For me at the National Library, it always has been, and I know that it always will be. I was going to finish by saying thank you, but on the way in, I was thinking I might channel Babe and say, "That'll do little pig, that'll do. " So thank you.

Oh, hot water. Thank you. I lost at the distance. Okay. There's only one person in this room who's not allowed to ask the first question. Yeah. I'm happy to take any questions. We'll have a conversation with you. I can still speak. Yeah. Oh, okay. You might have been one of the other people I might have said no to, but yes. Yes, you. Yes.

Audience member 1:

As an outsider.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

Sorry, I should have said you've got to hang on for the microphone.

Audience member 1:

As an outsider, there are two prominent, wonderful aspects of the Library. One is the building and the physical structure that we're in. And the second is Trove, or I guess as a symbol for the broader digitisation project. Is that a balance? Are they intention or is that the wrong way to think of it?

Marie-Louise Ayres:

It's a really good question, Hugh. I mean, I think early on they were intention and I certainly remember Margie's in the room here many discussions about how we were going to kind of balance those. Actually, a bigger tension is that, as I've said, the infrastructure and I guess the capability buildings from here, but we don't own Trove. A thousand partners do. So more of attention has been that sense that people really associate Trave with the Library. I understand that and it's not wrong to do so, but it's so much more than that. So I'd say that the tension is really around there is this institution, its collections, its services, what it does, and then there's this huge kind of array of collections that are coming from many, many places that when you put them together, make something really, really different. So I'd say that's more of a tension.

And these days, I don't think anybody in the Library ... It's years since I've heard anybody complaining about all the money being spent on Trove instead of on the reading rooms, but it did happen early on, that's for sure. And naturally so. We're making a big change. Okay.

Yeah.

Audience member 2:

Congratulations on the magnificent innings. And I know everybody in this room is an admirer of you in such a fantastic way. Congratulations. You mentioned passing weather in a policy sense and a resourcing sense. I just wonder on your way out with a little more freedom, what would you do if you were a policy god to inoculate the cultural institutions, including the NLA, against future buffeting?

Marie-Louise Ayres:

I think we're already ... Look, you can't completely future proof. I mean, I have just spent a week with colleagues from Canada, New Zealand, and the US. I can tell you there are limits to what you can do. However, there are things that we can do. The next version of the National Cultural Policy is in development at the moment, and as I've kind of said and written, the first version revive came right at the end of COVID. It came when the performing arts was on its knees. And when it talked about strong cultural infrastructure, it was often talking about venues. We have an amazing opportunity now with the next version of the cultural policy to really talk about the social infrastructure that libraries like this, public library systems, museums, galleries, right down to historical societies to kind of really talk about the way that they underpin a lot of our societal health.

So I think that often you need to make sure that you're joined up with some other big policy agendas and that would be the one that I would kind of talk about. I think for us, I would say a couple of things for the National Library that really help us. One is the National Library Act is magnificent. It is very clear and it's also broad enough to give us latitude to move in different ways. And the fact that we have a true board of governance, the National Library Council is a true board. Its board members have directors duties. It is not the advisory board that is at the National Archives. None of the other National Library of New Zealand, no board. Library and Archives Canada, no board. Library of Congress, no board. Now, when that happens, when you don't have a layer of strong governance between the institution and elected officials, you can be a lot more buffeted.

And in particular, you may not get to choose where your investment goes. So I think we've got the things in place for the National Library, but I'd be saying, get in and make comments about the next version of the National Cultural Policy because it's going to last for another five years or so. And once those things are embedded, they're harder to undo.

Audience member 3:

Hello. Thanks for your talk. You mentioned in your remarks the risk of more trust being lost and eroded by unconsidered outrage. And I wanted to ask what your thoughts on the role of libraries as institutions was in that when we're also seeing, in terms of social phenomena, a sort of anti-intelligency sentiment as well.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

Yeah. Look, I think again, you need to think thoughtfully about this. And libraries have been places that have been places of safe discourse. We try to be that, and it's kind of getting a bit harder, but I think you can think around where can you meet people where they are. Because I've been involved for quite a while now with the Office for Social Cohesion, and I've talked about libraries. I've talked about places we already know in Australia where there is low trust in government, low trust in expertise, places where there might be really unusually low trust in things like vaccination, and at the same time you've got really high proportions of the population who are members of their public library, that's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to create spaces where we're meeting people where they are and where we're just listening. It's so easy not to listen when you become so sure of your own views.

And I think that's what I've found quite distressing over the last few years is that the capacity to listen seems to have been kind of compromised and I'd like it not to be so. In terms of that threat to expertise, that is really, really serious, but at least we as libraries keep on doing our work of collecting. The Library of Congress is continuing to do its work. They are still collecting all of the expertise, all of the knowledge, all of the publications that are being produced in their country, even though they're an environment where we know that there are threats to that idea of expertise. So I think we are about, even in really tough times, you can put your head down, you can build your collections and hope for better times later on. And that's what we have to do sometimes. We have in my time here, I had to just put our heads down, duck for a while and keep going.

Audience member 4:

Hello. I'm wondering if you can consider the relationship between high school libraries, public libraries, and the National Library. And where this comes from is a distress we found as parents when our children were in high school, when libraries were being rebranded as information hubs, when physical books were being removed, and that wasn't being replaced by a sense of the technology as a resource for acquiring information. And what relationship do you have with local libraries and how can you as the National Library, as an institution, help local libraries, which as anyone with small children knows, is one of the favourite places for kids to be, that will run to get into their library.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

The only way that we can work with public libraries is through our state colleagues who are the ones who are responsible for those systems. Now this is not the case in every country, National Library of New Zealand, of course it's a unitary system, no states, no provinces or anything. They do have direct responsibilities. We don't have any direct responsibilities for public libraries or for libraries and educational institutions, but that doesn't mean we can't do nothing. So in fact, in the discussions in New Zealand last week, we're talking a lot about reading, about the decline of reading and what we as an entire library field can actually do about this. I think public libraries in Australia are booming. We see so much investment going into public libraries, and I hope that to some extent they might be helping to make up for the dearth of libraries in schools, which I'll come back to in a moment And I think we've also seen our state libraries really step up to the plate.

Think about the state library of New South Wales, welcoming hundreds and hundreds of students every afternoon, not just to sit and do their homework, but to kind of do their work, to use the collections that are there. They've just, I know, reopened their new Dixon Reading Room, and it's all about making it easier for students to access resources. In terms of school libraries, we agree that the root problem here is basically the devolution of funding to individual principals.This is the way that most public schools run these days. An individual principal has a bucket of money and they have to decide where it's going to be. And they're having to make a decision on, are we going to have the library or have it three days a week or are we going to really support that kid with special needs who needs to have one-to-one support in the classroom so they can pursue their kind of rights to learn?

I certainly feel that with the split we have in Australia now of a third of children going to, I'll call them partially publicly funded schools because they're not private schools and public schools that this is really the difference between the library resources and the, I guess, really having early and great instruction about how to use information resources. It's increasingly the province of the rich and I don't like it. Our role here, I suppose, is because we're at a distance. We've invested for a number of years in our digital classroom and we're not really aiming to reach kids there. We're aiming to reach the teachers who need to walk into the classroom, ready to teach to the curriculum with a package of really good quality primary sources that they can use to inspire the kids in that classroom. That's the kind of role that we can do.

So I think there's so much that's not good in the whole arena of school libraries. Just recently though, I have been hearing colleagues out in the states saying, "Maybe it's getting a little bit better again." So I live in hope. Yeah. Okay. Great. One more? Yeah. I'll give you a last one. Two more. I'll take two more and then I think my voice is done.

Audience member 5:

Yeah. Hi. You talked about microfiche and digitisation and generally obviously there's been a lot of digitisation and there's a finite amount of space for storing physical stuff, but there's a real historical interest and it's fascinating when you look at things by microfiche, which probably most of us looking around as them have done.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

Yes, me too.

Audience member 5:

Are you going to still retain a certain amount of things like microfiche? Because it's really an important part of, again, the whole history of how we remember things.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

I think it is too. And so even when we film from the, when we digitise from the film, we keep the preservation copies. It's the used copies that in many cases, it's not worth reinvesting in those. So I mean, it's just like we've kept examples of bits of card catalogues. And we have a little museum here of sound recording equipment and computers because we do think kind of it's not just that we sometimes need to get the content of kind of maintaining that sense of what have been the different mechanisms by which knowledge has been transferred over time and place. That is important. And I can assure you, I think it's going to be a very long time before there's no microfilm or fiche in our reading rooms, so not in my lifetime. Okay. Last one here.

Audience member 6:

Just interested in the thing that's delighted you most about your time here at the Library.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

It's the people. It's the people. It's the people that I've had the privilege of working with and still work with. It's been the absolutely amazing people that you get to meet in this role. People I would never have met, otherwise. It's a privilege of working with people sometimes when they're really in extremists. I mean, this happens when you're collecting. You're often dealing with people who are dying or are just bereaved. So there's something very intimate about that work of collecting from people, of working with people, and even of working across big systems. It's the people. Yes, I love the collections, but when I think about what I'll miss most, what will be hardest when I drive away from here next Wednesday afternoon, it's actually the hundreds of people who make this place work and the many hundreds more with whom I've worked. It was lovely to be in New Zealand last week because many of the people that I was with, I've been working with for 20 years.

So it's the people. Yeah. Thank you.

Larissa Behrendt:

Well, a powerhouse speech from a powerhouse woman. I feel a bit emotional actually, but I have come to be reminded with my time of deep engagement with Marie-Louise that libraries are a place of hope and what a lovely message to leave us with, that they're also a place of love. So thank you, Marie-Louise, for that insightful and heartfelt, reflective presentation full of wisdom and things for us to continue to think about. But thank you also for your clarity of purpose, your steady leadership, and your enduring commitment to the library's mission. Your legacy is not only in what has been built, preserved, and digitised, but in the confidence and the direction that you leave behind. The library will not be the same without you, but it is better and stronger for the time you have led it. So on behalf of the board, the library staff and all of your admirers, we extend our gratitude and our very best wishes for what comes next.

Friends, please join me in thanking Mari Louise Ayers once again.