CAUL's Diamond Anniversary

Ken McKinnon

My problem in writing about the Committee of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) is the consciousness that university libraries are a serious business. Levity or absence of gravitas in any reference to libraries or librarains has always been unwise. You must not even tell stories about librarians behind their backs because the word always gets back to them. They have the best network of supporters in universities.

It is similar to a situation I was in years ago when I was working on a small island off the coast of Papua New Guinea. A visiting Australian parliamentarian dressed in a thick woollen suit had to wade a long way through knee deep mud and mangroves to get ashore. His first hot and bothered utterance was 'I don't know what money you're getting, but it is not enough.' Libraries in universities are like that. Members of the university community always say that not enough resources are being made available for the library. Confident of wide support, students pick the library as the perennial protest topic, complaining about shortage of seats, or books, or periodicals, or staff, or terminals, or whatever...