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The President of ALIA, Averill Edwards, and the architect of the new building, Philip Cox, addressed the gathering. Their speeches, together with that of the Governor-General, and the closing address of the Past-President, are reproduced in full — see page 3.

It was a moving occasion for all who attended, and afforded the opportunity for many old and new members and friends to meet and exchange anecdotes, united in their vision of the critical place library and information services must play in Australia's future, and of the role of the Association in that future.

Governor-Gener " lays ALIA's Foundation Ston

he wheel has turned full circle. On Monday 23 October 1989 the Governor-General of Aus­

tralia, the Honourable Bill Ha­yden, laid the Foundation Stone for the new Australian Library and Informa­tion Association head office building in Canberra, the city of the Association's inception.

The ceremony was attended by 130 people from a number of States and Territories, and many more messages of support came into the Association's temporary office from members unable to make it because of other commit­ments or the pilots' strike.

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np Executive Director Sue Kosse (left) signs the official register os National President Averill Edwards and ALIA staff Thelma Hutchins and Paula Jovicic look on.

v The moment everyone had been waiting for. His Excellency the Honourable Bill Hayden Governor-General of the Commonwealth sets the ALIA foundation stone.

The NSW contingent: Sue Kosse (left), Heather Black, Pat Ward, Dawn Springett, Rosemary McLaughlin, Ena Noel and Eoin Wilkinson.

INCITE 13NOVEMBER 1 9 8 9 Q

From 1 • •

Opening address by Averill M.B. Edwards, President of ALIAYour Excellencies, members, ladies and gentlemen. It is my great pleasure on behalf of the Australian Library and Information Association to welcome you here today to the laying of the Founda­tion Stone of the head office building of the Association. I am particularly pleased, Your Excellency, to be able to welcome such a distinguished Austra­lian as yourself, and one who has a lifelong commitment to libraries and to reading. I understand that this is the first Foundation Stone to have been laid by you since you assumed this Office of Governor-General; it seems especially appropriate that this Stone should be set for a professional association com­mitted to the collection and dissemina­tion of information to the whole com­munity.

For me, today has some of the quali­ties of a dream: it seems hard to believe that we are here in Canberra, laying the Foundation Stone for a purpose-de­signed building to serve as the head­quarters of our national Association. I have to put a finger out to touch the brickwork to be sure that it is real. Members have worked long and hard to ensure that this day arrived, and I wish to pay tribute to the foresight and energy which has ensured that this project has come to reality. The decision to move to Canberra was not taken without controversy, but once taken the decision now has wide support and will result in significant benefits for the Association.

1989 has been a year of large-scale change for ALIA, but these changes are helping to position the Association and the profession to face the challenges of the end of the Twentieth Century and the start of the Twenty-first. This year we have a new name — encompassing information, and reflecting the changes both in our own profession and in our society.

ALIA has embraced new objectives —three of them reinforcing those which served for 50 years as the goals of this Association — the promotion and im­provement of library and information services, and of information personnel, the encouragement of professional aspirations, and of others interested in libraries. The new and significant objec­tive requires us to represent the inter­ests of members to governments, other organisations and the community.

We have also a new location. After 51 years in Sydney, the head office moved in July to temporary premises in Barton. As ALIA is a national associa­tion, we could be located in any one of the States, but we believe that it is a mark of maturity for a national associa­tion to move to the national capital. ALIA remains a national organisation, strongly State based, but now with the additional advantage of being in Can­berra. With branches in every State and Territory, ALIA has nine governments, as well as local governments, to whom it relates, and now it has the opportu­nity to develop stronger relations with the Federal Government.

This Association has a major role to play in advising and lobbying both State and Commonwealth Governments on matters germane to our profession. We will be able to influence federal politi­cians and bureaucrats more effectively here than if we were located interstate.

We will be able to observe more closely the Commonwealth activities of impor­tance to us, and to provide advice and opinion at the appropriate time, as we will continue to do at the State level. We will develop a greater national profile, in which our views are seen as impor­tant and are sought, without in any way abandoning our existing State profile and activities. We will further develop our relations with sister associations in the Asian and Pacific region, and our international role, through our mem­bership of the International Federation of Library Associations.

The move to Canberra marks a new phase in the history of the Association, with the development of a better na­tional identity and profile. This new identity is symbolised by the location in Deakin, in an area allocated specifically for national associations, in recognition of the importance to the Commonwealth of such bodies. I would like to thank the

TheMetcalfe Medallion

John Metcalfe was responsible for establishing the basis of the profession of librarianship in Australia and was the dominating influence in the profession in this country until his retirement in the 1960s. John Metcalfe and his contribution to librarianship and library education are commemorated by the Australian Library & Information Association through the Metcalfe Medallion.

The award is for the most outstanding essay or other piece of work on any topic in the areas of librarianship, information science or archives administration, submitted by a student undertaking a first award in librarianship or archives administration.

Students are invited to submit entries for this award. There is no specified form or style of entry - essay, AV or other items may be submitted. They should be pieces of work of publishable or reproducible standard.

For further infomnation contact:

Membership and Division Services Manager Australian Library & Information Association

PO Box E441Queen Victoria Terrace ACT 2600

Phone (062) 85 1877; (008) 02 0071 (toll free) Facsimile (062) 82 2249

or the Head of your School or Department of Librarianship

Q INCITE 13 NOVEMBER 19 8 9

Commonwealth Government for the offer of the land for this building on such favourable terms. We are grateful for the friendly, helpful and construc­tive assistance given by Commonwealth Government agencies to date, and look forward to a similar relationship with the ACT Government.

On this exciting and significant day, thanks are due to all the members of this Association for their faith in the future of ALIA and for their confidence in our ability to play an essential part in that future.

Address by architect,Philip CoxYour Excellency, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It is a rare occur­rence that the architect is given the opportunity to speak at the laying of the Foundation Stone of a building.

I am not sure whether Aiam did it for Chios before his incarceration, or Ictimus was afforded this privilege on the Acropolis at the commencement of the Parthenon. However, on this occa­sion I am pleased to be a part of the ceremony to mark the commencement of the building.

History shows us that the com­mencement of any building has been a sacred and spiritual experience. Priests have been employed to call upon the assistance of the gods that the building will proceed with speed and security, and in today's building and industrial climate we too must call upon the gods in order to abate the fury of building and industrial unions.

This building in many respects is a symbolic building. It represents the unity of the Australian Library and Information Association throughout Australia. It represents knowledge and professionalism, as well as a place of exchange of ideas and purpose.

Philip Cox, architect.[Photos on pages 1 and 4: Jonathan Mandl]

During the course of the design we have been given every encouragement to produce a building of excellence, and it has certainly been a pleasure in work­ing with the Association in a collective sense to achieve a purpose.

A long time ago, in our colonial times, Lady Franklin, the wife of the then Governor, produced a Doric temple in the wilderness as a symbol of civilisa­tion and culture. That temple stands today, and reminds us of the determina­tion of our forebears to demonstrate Australian culture and expressions to the rest of the world. Australia is emerg­ing as an interesting and vital centre for the arts, and architecture has at last got a self confidence and an Australian viewpoint, which now distinguishes it from other architectures in the world.

The mark of any civilisation is in the buildings, artworks, literature and music of that period, and we are fortu­nate in living in an age which is at a high point.

History has demonstrated that all cultural endeavours go in peaks and troughs. The 1990s promises to be one of the high points from which the Twen­tieth Century as a whole will be evalu­ated. We only have to look at the recent development in Sydney and Canberra, and throughout Australia, to see evi­dence of this.

The Australian Library and Infor­mation Association building cannot be compared in scale to many of the larger monuments in Australia. However, to me it represents the same qualities as Lady Franklin's museum in Tasmania.

I thank the Association for the op­portunities that our company has been given, and I also thank the Governor- General and his office for their contin­ual support for the arts in Australia.

Address by the Honourable Bill Hayden, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of AustraliaThank you for those warm words of welcome. Can I say how pleased I am to be with you today to lay the Foundation Stone for this new head office building in Canberra for the Australian Library and Information Association.

I say this for two reasons. To begin with, this is the first Foundation Stone I have laid since taking up the Office of Governor-General and I am sure it will add another rewarding chapter to the volumes of new experience I have been acquiring in this job.

Secondly, and far more importantly, is the fact that this building is to serve as the headquarters of the Association, and I think no one could deny the very great significance of libraries, of books, of reading and, increasingly in this elec­tronic age, of information and data-re- trieval systems.

The knowledge to be found stored in our libraries represents not only the accumulation of the received wisdom of the past. It also represents, if I may extend the metaphor into our purpose here today, the foundation and the build­ing blocks upon which our society and our civilisation will construct the fu­ture.

It is therefore not only my pleasure but my privilege to perform this cere­mony for you today.

Hy1 Judy (left) Kate and Ian McCollum, AMBE,His Excellency the Honourable Bill Hoyden, Eoin Wilkinson, David Barron and Justice Rae Else-Mitchell.

INCITE 13NOVEMBER 1 9 8 9 Q

Now, the Association in one form or another has been in existence for over half a century. It was first established at a meeting in Canberra by fifty-five li­brarians in 1937 as the Australian Insti­tute of Libraries. In fact, one of those fifty-five librarians is here today — Sir Harold White, the first National Librar­ian. May I particularly welcome Sir Harold to this occasion, in which the vision he and his colleagues had is now being transformed into very tangible stones and mortar.

This is, of course, not the Association's first building. Although formed in Canberra, for many years most of the officers were located in Sydney where the Association pur­chased a property firstly in Surrey Hills and then in Ultimo, by which time the Association had fifteen full-time paid staff.

Yet as you will all be aware, there has been discussion about returning to Canberra for some time, and it was finally decided at the 1986 Annual General Meeting. The reasons for the move have already been traversed here today and I won't go over them again... except to note that by returning to Canberra you are again at the centre of many important aspects of national political, cultural and professional life.

To this extent I think that the deci­sion to re-locate must be welcomed. After all, the Association has more than 7500members throughout Australia and overseas ... and as a national organisa­tion it is important that the views and interests of your members are repre­sented within this broad national con­text.

It is important when we consider the purposes of the Association.

It is a professional body whose ob­jects are to promote and improve the services of libraries and other informa­tion agencies ... to constantly enhance the professional standing of those who work in libraries and information centres... to represent those interests to governments, other organisations and the community at large — in short, to raise the level of awareness of the sig­nificance of the cultural and intellectual heritage you represent.

These are worthy aspirations, and, if I may say so, ones that I believe in­creasingly are shared by all people in our society.

In this respect I was very interested to see some figures produced recently by the Australia Council indicating that reading, both for business as well as pleasure, forms part of the daily lives of two-thirds of Australian men and

women. If I may put it in some kind of broader context, twice as many people read for leisure as go walking ... and three times as many as those who prefer to socialise in clubs and pubs.

A recent ABS survey showed that Australians spend an average of 25 minutes a day reading, equivalent to about 9 per cent of their leisure time occupation and about the same as Can­ada. I regret to say, however, that we still spend about 40 per cent of our leisure time activities watching television or videos.

Yet even so, we still spend about $620 million a year on buying books — rather more than we do on buying newspapers and magazines, and more than twice the amount we spend on records and audio tapes.

All this is very encouraging. What it does indicate, I think, in an age when we are told the printed word is increas­ingly under threat, is that the roles of books and the libraries who sustain them are still of extraordinary significance. I don't see how it could be otherwise.

The spoken word comes and goes, puffed upon the air. The electronic data services certainly make access much easier to the increasingly complex amount of information we produce. But in the end I think it is the printed word

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on the page that endures. It is the key that opens the door to our understand­ing not only of the knowledge of the past... but even within the present it is a gateway that will usher us into the future.

In this I hope that your new build­ing will not only serve, in an immediate and practical way, the work of your Association in serving the thousands of libraries and information services throughout this country — in the schools, the public, State, national, spe­cial and tertiary libraries. More impor­tantly I hope it will stand as eloquent testimony to those enduring values of wisdom and understanding that you and your Association represent.

Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you well. Let me congratulate the architects in having expressed these motivations and high ideals in their design for the building. And as I say it is not only my pleasure but also my privilege to be able to lay this Foundation Stone for the head office building of the Australian Library and Information Association.

Closing address by Alan Bundy, Past-President of ALIA (1988)Your Excellencies, distinguished guests, colleagues. That we have just witnessed the laying of the Foundation Stone of the Australian Library and Information Association national office owes much, indeed, to many. However, in particu­lar, it would be remiss of me to not now thank, on behalf of the Association's members throughout Australia, Averill Edwards for her unstinting leadership;

Sue Kosse for her heavy involvement in the project and for having achieved recently the very considerable task of relocating the Association's operations to Canberra; Eoin Wilkinson and Alex Byrne for their valued contributions to the Building Committee; Philip Cox and his associates for their caring attention to the project, and the Project Manager, Bill Rushton, who continues a personal interest in the project beyond, I suspect, the normal call of commercial duty.

Finally public acknowledgement must be made of the foresight and per­sistence of our 1986 President, Ian McCallum, who — following the com­prehensive re-assessment of the Association's aims, governance and operations during Warren Horton's Presidency — saw the possibilities and urged the necessity of the Association 'returning', as he was wont to empha­sise, to the national capital.

For indeed, as Sir Harold White will be especially aware, with the laying of the Foundation Stone by His Excellency, the Association has now symbolically and effectively returned to the city which saw its birth in 1937.

It has returned, as Averill Edwards emphasised, because we believe the national capital is the best place from which to foster the right of all Austra­lians to have access to the information they need for their betterment as indi­viduals and as members of Australian society.

There is much which needs to be done. Ninety-eight per cent of Austra­lians now have some form of access to public libraries, and over seven million Australians use them regularly because it may be the only type of library to which they do have access.

Yet for every public library in this country able to respond with some adequacy to the informational, educa­tional, cultural and recreational needs of Australian families; children; women; the elderly; multicultural communities; the illiterate and semi-literate; and the physically, mentally and socially disad­vantaged, there is another library with no such capacity.

There is no equality of opportunity to access by Australians to that most fundamental of commodities in a mod­em society — information. This must become a social justice issue for the nation, and for those who govern it.

Your Excellency, we believe that, despite its shortcomings, the national network of 14 000 school, academic, special and public libraries — with the leadership of the National Library — is unique in its mission, in its responsibili­ties and in its cooperation across local, State and national government bounda­ries; across institutional boundaries and across public and privatesector bounda­ries.

We are certain of the extended con­tributions we can make to a better-in­formed, a more democratic, a more productive, a more civilised, a more understanding, a more tolerant and ultimately a fairer Australia. The build­ing arising on this site — in form and fabric to endure a half century at least — is testimony to that certainty.

From your presence here today, Sir, we sense your strong empathy for our mission. We are most grateful for that presence, your words to us, and for the contribution you have made to this

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