President's Report 2014-15

Friends of the Launceston Mechanics' Institute Inc.

President's Report 2014-15

Introduction

It is a privilege to present this report to members on the occasion of our second Annual General Meeting. I take this opportunity to reflect on what has been achieved in the past year and to lay out our plans and aspirations for the coming year.

This group was formed at a public meeting on 18 October 2013. The group had its ownership of a major part of the LMI Collection confirmed by a Launceston City Council resolution in November 2013, and began to take delivery of the collection early in 2014. Since our last AGM that process has been completed and we now have approximately 22,000 volumes in our collection.

One of the goals adopted by that meeting were to establish and maintain a working research Launceston Mechanics’ Institute Collection, by:

1. Locating, selecting, organising, cataloguing and preserving existing materials once the property of the Launceston Mechanics’ Institute between 1842 and 1929;

Since adopting those goals, and in the light of further research, the closing date for the collection has been revised to 1945, the year in which Launceston City Council assumed responsibility for library services in the city.

Membership

FOLMI currently has over 60 members, and membership continues to grow as supporters are made aware of our activities.

Achievements This Year

Reviewing the goals set out at last year's AGM it is pleasing to see that we achieved all that we set out to achieve and more. As foreshadowed we:

•             Produced an electronic version of the LMI Accession Registers.

•             made substantial progress in recording all Launceston Mechanics' Institute items still held in the State Library of Tasmania's reference and heritage collections and in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery's collections.

•             started work on producing an inventory and photographic record of all surviving objects associated with the Institute, but will only be able to complete this when renovations at Launceston LINC are finished.

•             scoped a cataloguing project with Libraries Australia and TROVE, developed a budget to undertake this work and established a group of five volunteer librarians who are willing to undertake the copy cataloguing project.

•             Investigated local options for a permanent home for the collection.

By far the most important achievement in the past year has been the completion of the Significance Assessment process and the receipt of Dr Susan Marsden's final report which will be formally tabled at this meeting.

Dr Marsden's assessment has confirmed our belief in the importance and value of saving the collection in the strongest possible terms.

This significance assessment has confirmed that the size, quality, scope age and provenance of the LMI collection places its importance equal to or above any similar collection in Australia, and hence its national significance. The LMI Collection is not only the most substantial and comprehensive Institute library to have survived in an Australian regional centre from before 1850, but appears to be the most substantial and comprehensive library collection to have survived from the entire period of the flourishing of mechanics institutes in Australia, between the 1840s and the 1940s.

Based on the Report we have made further applications to the Community Heritage Grant program for;

1.            A Preservation Needs Assessment

2.            Cataloguing the collection and adding it to the National Bibliographic Database and TROVE.

During the year we also received a Grant of $1000 from Arts Tasmania from the Lynn Stacpoole 'Caring for Your Collection' scheme, for the purchase of a display cabinet.

In terms of energy expended the biggest task undertaken this year has been the recording of all of the uncatalogued books in the non-fiction and popular fiction collections. We have had a dedicated team of eighteen volunteers working on this project and they have recorded over 12,000 items which will facilitate the cataloguing of the collection when the time comes.

It has also been exciting to see our online presence growing, both in terms of content and usage. The blog now has 59 posts and has received nearly 6000 visits, our Flickr site has been expanded to seven albums and is even more heavily used, and we have a Facebook presence thanks to Sue and Emily McClarron. All of this activity increases our outreach and awareness of the project locally, nationally and globally.

We have made substantial progress in creating electronic archives of the Institute's Annual Reports and Printed Catalogues, which has greatly increased our understanding of both the Institution and its Library Collection.

Individual members have undertaken research projects of enormous long-term value, including Dorothy Rosemann who has spent many hours at QVMAG working through the Institute records to record the role played by women in the Institute, Sue McClarron who has researched the history and many changes in the way the library collection was organised, and Anna Lynde who has identified and recorded a substantial collection of books by the intrepid lady travellers and explorers of the nineteenth century.

We have also worked with QVMAG to establish and reassemble their collections of the surviving books from many smaller libraries in the region, most notably those of Evandale, Longford and Deloraine.

The Coming Year

The central priority in the coming year must be to support the two major projects (if funded) of completing a Preservation Needs Assessment and managing the cataloguing project. We were able to manage the Significance Assessment process very effectively and learnt a lot in the process. That we were able to complete that project on budget and eight months ahead of the deadline should give both FOLMI and the Community Heritage Grants team confidence in our capacity to deliver.

We will also use this year to build our network of support in the community and to reach out to communities of interest, especially academic research projects who could benefit from access to the collection (e.g. University of Sydney, Librarianship students). Our Significance Assessment Report offers a strong foundation for publicising the collection in the local community and we are working on a plan to achieve this.

Through the coming winter we will be working with the staff at QVMAG to reorganise the Institute's records into a more user friendly archive.

Acknowledgements

In conclusion I acknowledge the contributions of our committee members, our hard-working volunteers, and the support of all members, in what has been achieved to date.

I take this opportunity to record my gratitude to Dr Susan Marsden for the thorough, professional and timely completion of her report. It was everything we could have hoped for and more, and a most cordial and productive collaboration. We were indeed fortunate that someone of Susan's calibre was willing to undertake the brief.

I also thank those members and supporters who met with Dr Marsden, gave their time to supporting her site visit, and provided input to the report.

I also want to acknowledge the National Library and thank their Community Heritage Grant team for their contribution. This is an outstanding scheme, exceptionally well-organised and very supportive of grant recipients.

I thank the management and staff of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston LINC and the State Library of Tasmania, for their ongoing assistance and support.

And again I thank the members of Mechanics' Institutes of Victoria Inc. for their advice, guidance and their enthusiastic support this past year.

Peter Richardson, President, 22 May 2015