History of the book in Australia: impacts of public policy in the second half of the twentieth century

To the memory of Dietrich Hans Borchardt, bibliographer and friend, 1916-1997 This article, based on a paper delivered at the 1997 HOBA (History of the Book in Australia) conference, discusses the implications of the term 'history of the book in Australia'. Consideration focuses on official publications in Australia and the impact of the 1964 Report of the Erwin Joint Select Committee on Government and Parliamentary Publications. The place of official publications in the collections of major libraries and their value as items for international gift and exchange between libraries are discussed. Next, the role of public institutions is considered, especially that of the National Library of Australia's attempts to develop the 'national collection'. The idea of the Distributed National Collection is reviewed, and the need for clarity on what is understood by a 'national collection' is stressed. A case is stated for a non-parliamentary committee of inquiry into problems of acquisitions and resources now confronting Australian libraries generally and the National Library in particular. The article concludes by examining the future of the important nineteenth-century collections of the Australian parliamentary libraries. A note of caution is sounded against taking 'use' as the guiding criterion for deciding whether to sell off or discard books from these libraries.