TUCKED away in a back room of the University of Tasmania’s Newnham campus sit 25,000 books, periodicals, maps and letters once held in the Launceston Mechanics Institute.
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At least a few times a month, you will find inside a small group of volunteers cataloguing each item - their current project, correspondence, mainly of a business nature, dating at around 1899.
The correspondence is just one component of the collection that largely hasn’t seen the light of day since the grand building was demolished in 1971 to make way for what is today, Civic Square.
Under the guidance of the Friends of the Launceston Mechanics Institute president Peter Richardson, the collection has only recently been recognised as of national significance for its size, quality, scope, age and provenance, and its importance is equal to or above any similar collection within Australia.
The significance of the collection was recognised by professional historian Susan Marsden, who undertook a comprehensive assessment and found it to be of high cultural, and to some extent monetary, value.
Ms Marsden’s report states: ‘‘The collection is primarily of historical significance as a rich and now rare set of books and periodicals dating mainly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that comprises the larger part of the library of a major mechanics institute in an important regional city in Australia, and illustrating the reading habits, information sources and connections of a colonial and non-metropolitan city, and its international and British empire connections’’.
The report goes on to say that while the collection was significant as a whole, there were also particularly important individual items such as the first edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, books inscribed to and donated by founding settlers and collectable items.
While a figure on the entire worth of the collection is hard to provide, part of it previously held in the Launceston LINC’s Phil Leonard Room was valued at $96,450 in 1995, the Victorian and Edwardian collection of periodicals in bound volumes, $24,200 and the books of these same periods, $355,100.
Yet of course, it could never be replaced, Mr Richardson said.
The friends took custody of the collection from the Launceston City Council in 2013, prior to the Launceston LINC beginning renovations.
‘‘Our idea was that we would have a look at the collection, because a lot of it had been boxed up and stored away for years and try and assess whether it was an important collection and if it merited preservation,’’ Mr Richardson said.
‘‘25,000 books is a fairly big investment in storage.’’
The group of volunteers has worked tirelessly on the collection over the past couple of years and in October received a small grant of $6127 for a preservation needs assessment from the National Library of Australia.
While all the non-fiction books have been catalogued and are displayed on shelves, all the fiction books remain packed in cartons, stacked against a wall.
The group brought in Ms Marsden to assess the collection in 2014.
While the collection once would have been bigger, items had been disposed of through wear and tear in the library and some sections are now held elsewhere, such as the photographs at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.
The oldest book dates to about 1660 and another 300 date to before 1800, which would include those donated by individuals and families when the library was established in 1842.
It is understood 98 books established the collection, which quickly grew to 170 by October of that first year.
The institute was established in the days before state operated libraries and came about through discussions amongst a group of men, that included Rev. John West - who was also in the process of starting The Examiner.
It was a user pays system, where you paid a nominal fee to access the collection, which had as one of its objectives the ‘‘promotion of science and the arts and the diffusion of general literature’’ for access by all classes to promote an intellectual culture.
The institute was built on land granted from the government in 1843 and the foundation stone laid in 1857. It officially opened in 1860.
The building featured a reading room, library, classroom, museum, a second classroom or lecture room and a keeper’s apartment.
The first floor had a laboratory and lecture hall, able to seat 700, with 25 feet high walls.
It is said to have been demolished because of the significant deterioration and then extensive renovations required to retain the building, which the institute members could not pay for.
One person who can recall working in the institute was Mary Dent, who started there as a volunteer 16-year-old in 1945, charged with putting away the children’s books.
After completing her matric and in her late teens, she was sent to the Library of New South Wales to be trained as a librarian - a job she largely held at the institute, minus a few breaks when she began to show during pregnancy, until her retirement in 1988.
Now aged 86, it was her daughter who encouraged her to get involved with the friends of the institute and help re-catalogue the collection - something she has certainly done before.
While the former mechanics institute building was regarded as quite grand, Mrs Dent said it needed to be demolished for the gaping holes and rot that had taken hold of the building - to the point rats were getting in amongst the collection.
‘‘It had to go really. It was a huge job moving all the books over to the new library, I think we had removalists move all the furniture but it took a whole fortnight to put everything in order,’’ she said.
But don’t dare ask Mrs Dent what she thinks of the term of ‘‘Linc’’ for the library today, as she put, she thinks they’ve ‘‘gone balmy’’.
In line with the report’s findings and recommendations, and with the knowledge that the collection is of some significance, Mr Richardson said the aim was to ensure its proper protection and ultimately find a permanent home and that would still allow it to be accessed by the public.
For this they intend to put together a project plan, which would be funded in part by the recent grant and see a specialist conservator to assess the collection in early December.
Anyone interested in finding out more about the collection can contact the group at launcestonmechanicsinstitute@gmail.com