Hon Peter Dunne

Minister of Internal Affairs

9 March 2016
Speech

The National Library: Its place in New Zealand’s information society

National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, 9.00am, 9 March 2016.

Tena kouto.

I am very glad to welcome you all to New Zealand, and particularly to Wellington, our capital.

A few of you here today, I know, have been here before – and to you I say ‘welcome back’!

However some, even many of you, have not been here before, and I am especially glad to welcome those people – hoping that our small friendly city with its brisk and breezy weather will leave a positive impression on you.

But whether you are old friends or new, I certainly offer all of you my best wishes for the success of the first meeting of CDNL-Asia/Oceania in New Zealand.
I would like to acknowledge the National Library, part of my Department, whose staff have worked hard to ensure the success of your meeting.

In particular, I would like to acknowledge the guidance of the National Librarian, Bill Macnaught, as the Chair of CDNL-AO and host of the meeting.
I also congratulate the National Diet Library, Tokyo, for its valuable work in ensuring consistently high-quality web-based communication about the activities of CDNL-AO.

But to all of you, let me say how delighted I am to see 27 delegates from 17 national libraries assembled here.

I welcome you particularly to Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, the National Library of New Zealand.

I know that you were welcomed by a pōwhiri last night, and that will have given you an idea of the importance which we in Aotearoa New Zealand attach to the culture and the achievements of Māori, the tangata whenua, the people of the land.

I, as a Minister in the Government of New Zealand, join in that welcome and hope that while you are here you come to learn a little more about New Zealand’s history and the role the Treaty of Waitangi has played in shaping our society.

I hope you also take the opportunity to learn more about the role of the National Library in protecting and preserving the documentary heritage of all the peoples of New Zealand – the tribes (iwi), the people of European origin who arrived more recently, along with people from the Pacific islands and other regions of the world.

New Zealand is a new country, a new society, which has developed entirely in the age of industrial mass-production of books, the age of photography, of scientific discoveries, and the age of communications media which we must work hard to preserve.

The reason for preserving sources of information is to give access to the content of those sources – those documents, whether in paper form, or on vinyl, or film, or entirely in digital form.

Our children have grown up in the age of cinema, television and the Internet.
We are a society saturated by information, for better or worse.

But, in our society, thinkers, educators, researchers, government - and the leaders of the library sector – have been thinking deeply, since the turn of the millennium, about how to enable the development of New Zealand as a true Information Society.

The National Library of New Zealand is at the forefront of efforts to provide wide access to information to all citizens, to enable them to play their part in our Information Society.

Already at the first World Summit on the Information Society, 13 years ago, New Zealand was instrumental in putting ‘access to information’ at the heart of the Geneva Principles, along with such fundamental principles as access to education, and access to a well-governed Internet for the good of all.

The expertise of the National Library and the Archives in providing digital access to information have helped us, over the past ten years, to develop and implement firstly a National Digital Heritage Archive, then a Government Digital Archive.

We believe that preserving the record of government is important, and preserving the cultural, scientific and artistic record of the growth of our modern multicultural society is essential.

If we do not preserve the memory of where we came from, then we will always struggle with the notion of our cultural identity.

Moreover, despite our geographical isolation, our cultural roots are present in many other regions of the world, our laws derive from concepts shared with other nations, our people have family connections all around the world.
We are a small population, but interconnected.

We live in a rugged land, with difficult physical communication routes – so we need the Internet!

A quarter of the people holding New Zealand passports are resident outside New Zealand: they need the Internet to keep in touch with home.

The National Library takes all these threads into account in providing information services to our people within New Zealand and abroad.

One example is the new system for digital access via the web to the documentary riches of the Turnbull Library collections.

Another example is the remodelled Services to Schools, one of the most significant services of the National Library in collaboration with the Ministry of Education.

Services to Schools provides a very strong digital offering to the education sector, while it continues to provide the conventional print book service from the National Library’s schools collection, as required.

Those examples are significant, because if we do not teach New Zealand’s past and present to our younger generations, we will risk their future – our future.

To maintain a cohesive democratic society, with not too many digital divides, we must make cultural and educational resources easily accessible, and motivate young people to want to seek out and evaluate information.

For us, education, cultural awareness, true literacy, and the skills of ‘digital literacy’ are all equally important.

These are just a few insights into the role of the National Library in our Information Society, and I know many of you are facing similar challenges in your own countries. It’s easier when we face these challenges together.

I will be most interested to hear later from Bill Macnaught about the new ideas and shared progress you will all make together over the coming days.

I wish you all a rewarding and enjoyable meeting ahead, and declare the 2016 annual meeting of the Conference of Directors of National Libraries of Asia and Oceania open. Thank you.

ends

© Scoop Media