The pending closure of the Architecture and Planning Library at The University of Auckland (Te Herenga Whaihanga), as part of the planned closure of three NICAI Libraries starting in 2019 (Music, Architecture and Fine Arts), is one loss the architectural community is aware of, and very likely to have an opinion about.

A strong reaction from all sectors of the architecture community has emerged, with many articles published (print and online)¹, blogs², student protests³, meetings, lectures, videos and exhibitions.⁴ The profession added their voice⁵, and current academic staff have been working with care to maintain communication with worried students, alongside their huge effort to save the specialist libraries.⁶ Others are more accepting of the changing role of libraries globally, and that our academic libraries are affected.

Discussion around the closure of Auckland’s ‘Architecture Library’ has proven to be a sensitive topic, and as a registered architect, a member of staff at The University of Auckland, and a Fellow of the Institute, there are many toes that I can stand on with these words. I will try to tread lightly.

I view the planned ‘closure’ as two separate losses – the first being the relocation of the specialist collection and archive to the General Library on Princes St, and the second being the demolition of the 1970s Conference Centre building, designed by KRTA and occupied by the library since 1982, and which includes the Design Theatre.⁷

Strangely, the losses are unrelated, each with their own effects. They become conflated due to over three decades of experience and memory, which can result in nostalgia leading the discourse and action. The dissipation of a highly-respected academic collection has at times been lost amongst the nostalgic affection for a building.⁸ Here I address the first issue only, with perhaps the discussion around (yet another) 1970s New Zealand architecture casualty for another time,

Both the specialist architecture collection and the architecture archives, established in 1927, are considered as taonga, nationally and internationally significant assets of cultural importance. Relocation may result in a dissolved, reduced collection that is less accessible to architecture students, due to the physical dislocation from the architecture school and lack of browsing opportunities. (We all know what ‘in storage’ means for access to a library book.)

Yet it may also be an opportunity to slightly re-frame the collection – archiving and the control of collections has always been a political act. The power lies with specialist librarians who select, preserve and provide access to a broader community.

The shaping of collections can both reveal and obscure knowledge – on the one hand, canons are protected and preserved for future generations, and on the other, access to certain areas of knowledge is controlled, contained, or edited out - tending to support existing power structures. The decisions made around collections ‘influence the remembering or forgetting of our past’.⁹ For example, the decision to include non-English texts reflects a changing, broader user-group and may strengthen the community. This would be especially powerful for publications in Te Reo Māori.

Specialist Collection librarians, as shapers of collections, are as critical and political as ever - the real loss in this relocation process would be the lost opportunity to shift Nineteenth Century library models of power.

Other losses already covered in other media are of community cohesion, collection cohesion, reduced access to material not available online, (have you ever tried to find a Home & Building article from the 1960s online, or a pre-2009 NZIA Awards list?) and of a particular school identity. There is also a possible loss of trust in the longevity of the archives - and as Lucy Treep has so eloquently pointed out,¹⁰ the thread of trust is essential to future bequeaths.

In Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles¹¹  describes the endurance and destruction of libraries over millennia, with the control of collections used to erase history or support communities. The historical survey shows that libraries survive cultural change as well as natural disasters and book-burning rulers, and that adapting to the digital era is not a new challenge, and not insurmountable.

This positive view of the survival of libraries is welcomed at this critical time, and that despite the reduction and re-modelling of the careers of librarians, they will indeed continue to affect generations of future thought.