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John's Gospel : Metcalfe and the Writing of Australian Library History single work   biography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 John's Gospel : Metcalfe and the Writing of Australian Library History
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'John Wallace Metcalf (1901-1982) had a profound influence on the course of Australian library history, playing a major part in the establishment of the Australian Institute of Librarians (later the Library Association of Australia), working for the development of free public libraries, leading education for librarianship in Australia for over thirty years and making a significant contribution to the theory and practice of librarianship. Metcalfe's extensive published works, reminiscences, interviews, surviving manuscripts and diaries may tend to perpetuate a dominant Metcalfe view of Australian library history, but Metcalfe himself acknowledged that his interpretations could never be impartial. This paper focuses on the controversy, fuelled by Metcalfe, surrounding the role of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) in library development in Australia and shows how he sought to correct the record and provide raw material for future historians, in the process presenting a frankly biased and impressionistic account.' (Author's abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Collections, Characters & Communities : The Shaping of Libraries in Australia and New Zealand B. J. McMullin (editor), Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2010 Z1806840 2010 selected work poetry 'Collections, Characters and Communities brings to twenty-first-century readers a kaleidoscope of the rich and varied library world of Australia and New Zealand in the 1800s and 1900s. It is a story of public and private endeavours, of co-operation and inter-state rivalry, of dominant, not to say controlling personalities, and of the reach of books into the outback as well as into the working-class suburbs of cities. There is a North American dimension in Carnegie's support for the Dunedin Public Library and in his Corporation's critical and often unflattering view of Australian universities in the 1930s. Even South America makes an appearance through the library set up in the Australian utopian colony at Cosme in Paraguay. Otherwise it is a matter of the dense network of schools of arts, athanaeums and mechanics' or literary institutes across the two countries, not to mention notable urban concentrations of commercial lending collections before public libraries came into their own in the second half of the twentieth century. Librarians' training and collaboration, under the watchful eyes of such outsize figures as Redmond Barry and John Metcalfe, are at one end of a spectrum that also encompasses the needs of people in the Queensland bush. Bringing printed matter to all Australians and New Zealanders was manifestly never a straightforward process.' (Publisher's blurb)
         Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2010     pg. 43-61
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Last amended 15 Sep 2011 15:40:27
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