John Metcalfe: librarian by accident, eccentric by nature, and democratic by instinct

Bill Tully

btully@nla.gov.au

Abstract
John Metcalfe's upper-working-class origins, administrative pragmatism and personal egocentricity made him an unlikely chief librarian. Entering the profession by accident, elevated in 1931 to second-in-charge of the Public (later State) Library of New South Wales by the connivings of his superior, and dogged at first with a publicly diffident personality, he became a leading figure of the Free Library Movement (FLM) in the 1930s, and only later the well known educator, writer and state librarian. The FLM made books and information available to a much wider public by its pressure on government for funding. Metcalfe's involvement in national and international library co-operation from the 1940s to the 1960s widened his earlier New South Wales focus. Despite his eccentricities and flaws there was a strong democratic focus in his writings on how to systematise library holdings through coherent cataloguing principles, something not always apparent in the 1990s with its cyberspeak librarianship.