izrock

Last week Rene Vaile and I were looking hard for adventure.

And what’s more exciting than Canberra?

And Goulburn?

And shit skateparks?
I mean, really?

And rad graffiti.

Lots of it.

And libraries!

Rene helped me to get to Canberra and deposit a box of about 180 Australian zines and art books.

These had been requested by the incredible Julie Whiting, head of serials, and in my opinion head of being awesome at the National Library of Australia.

We couldn’t get that far without a tour of the guts of the archives.

As you can see they collect everything.

And really they do - Everything!

The shelving systems are amazing. They all butt up.

And it can get a little creepy down there.

These may or may not have been microfilms.

Everything that is published in Australia they want.

They have another 2 warehouses after this one.

If you request something from the library they’ll have it to you in 30 mins. 2 hours if it’s in one of the other warehouses.

They have an amazing map collection. They only have one copy of everything.

Maps to the stars homes.

There was a fire in the 80’s. Fire Dept. said. ‘We are going to loose the building.’ But they did not loose the building.

These aerial maps were hot!

Nothing too confidential for the internet.

Sheet music. Much of this has been scanned and put online as it’s no longer under copyright which is 50 years after the authors death.

Manuscript archives is where they keep the diaries and letters of important people. Now they are gathering terrabites of info on hard discs. Emails etc as, y’know, noone like writes letters anymore.

They also collect extensively from asia pacific regions. It is true that this library has better collection than many of the those countries, particularly the war torn and the history re-writers.

Amazing contrast between Japanese design.

It was a mind-boggling visit. The expanse of the archiving was a lot for the brain.

So we filmed ourselves skating instead.
Dorks.

Thanks to all those who donated self or independently published articles to this project and there were many of you.
They items will be safe and available forever. (Unless fire).
It is an exciting thing.

At the National library their next archiving target is… wait for it… and I am not kidding here - The Internet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.