When the National Library of Australia opened in 1968 the world was a turbulent place. The Vietnam War was in full swing, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and Richard Nixon became the 37th President of the United States.
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Closer to home Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared in the surf off Cheviot Beach, the anti-war movement was gaining momentum and 200m runner Peter Norman stood on the podium with US athletes at the Mexico Olympics as they raised their fists in protest.
A new exhibition at the NLA, 1968: Changing Times, celebrates the seminal year and the opening of a iconic building.
For current director-general Dr Marie-Louise Ayres the library is a special place. She's been working there for 16 years, just one year in the top job, and she still loves exploring the quiet places we traditionally associate with libraries.
"I have many favourite corners," she says.
"There's a beautiful quiet corner in the main reading room that looks out towards Commonwealth Avenue Bridge and if I need a little bit of quiet I take myself down there where nobody can find me.
"I also love our special collections reading room on the first floor. I've worked with special collections throughout my career and it was my dream to have this beautiful, calm space where people could engage deeply with the primary materials, the pictures, oral histories, manuscripts, the first documents that people want to work on, in a beautiful atmosphere."
She's insightful enough to realise the way people engage with the library is ever changing. There were more than 30.6 million visits to nla.gov.au in 2016-17 and 22.23 million visits to the Trove site where you can access more than 565 million online books, images, newspapers and more. More than 38,000 people follow the NLA on Facebook, more than 39,000 on Twitter. There is now 5.69 petabytes of digital storage. And, for the record, 259km of shelves housing 10 million items.
"In 1968 the assumption was one came to this building to do that work, that the collection lived here and you came here, to Canberra, to do your research," Dr Ayres says.
"What's just exploded in the past 20 or so years is we've become very active in the digital space and we know that our collections are being used by Australians in every corner of this enormous country, and across the world.
"The nature of how people use our collections has changed really radically in that period."
For the library, the digital space has allowed them to further develop their charter, says Dr Ayres. When the National Library Act was passed in 1960 the terms were "maintaining and developing a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the Australian people".
"There was this grand idea for a library, with a great collection accessible to the people of Australia, who did they have in mind to use the collection?" she says.
"We were in a male-dominated world, this is several years before the Public Service Marriage Bar was removed [in 1966], we had a less diverse community, the 1967 Referendum [which gave recognition to indigenous Australians] was years away …
"I don't think there was any thinking at the time that we would be a library that would be actively engaging with the indigenous community.
"The thing that has changed really dramatically through our digital services, it's not that we can get to many more people, we can get to different people and the questions we're always asking ourselves is who are we not serving, who is not benefiting from our collections who could do so and what do we do about that."
There has been a national library as such since 1901 when the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library was established in Melbourne. In 1927 the collections were moved to Canberra and were mainly housed at the West Block offices.
In 1907 the Joint Parliamentary Library Committee foreshadowed the idea of a building in the nation's new capital, with chairman Sir Frederick William Holder saying: "The library committee is keeping before it the ideal of building up, for the time when Parliament shall be established in the federal capital, a great public library … such a library, indeed, as shall be worthy of the Australian nation; the home of the literature, not of a state, or of a period, but of the world, and of all time."
It's fascinating now, so many years later, how that idea is being put into practice, in a grand building on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin and in the digital space.
1968: Changing Times is an opportunity to revisit the late 60s and celebrate the completion of one of Canberra's great public institutions. The exhibition will run from March 1 to August 12.
