An Exhibitions Committee regularly reviews progress on developing exhibitions, and the forward plan for several years into the future.  An Exhibitions Policy guides the Library's exhibitions activities.  The Exhibitions team is located within the Public Programs division of the Library, although staff from specialist collection areas are closely involved in exhibitions, as are staff from Preservation, who undertake assessment and any necessary conservation of exhibition items. 

As well as exhibitions within the National Library building, the Library makes an online version of many of its exhibitions available for visitors to the website (http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/online.html).  With Australia being a very large country, with the population spread over an area of over 7 1/2 million square kilometres, there is also a travelling exhibitions program, taking some exhibitions touring throughout Australia.

The majority of the Library's exhibitions draw from the resources in the Library's own collections.  The current photographic exhibition, In a New Light, Australian Photography 1930s to 2000, displays a small fraction of the Library's photographic items (http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/newlight2/index.html ).  It follows an earlier exhibition of photographs from the 1850s to 1930s.
 
 

Unknown Photographer  [Wedding Party for the Marriage of Nora Augusta Maud, Daughter of Sir Hercules and Lady Nea Robinson, to A.K. Finlay, August 1878, Sydney] albumen photograph; 23.5 x 30.2 cm nla.pic-an24648348

Although the majority of exhibitions have a quite serious theme, one of the exhibitions which is still touring after being initially mounted inhouse its specifically directed at a younger audience.  Bunyips! explores the myth of the bunyip, a creature of Aboriginal legend.  The website at http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/bunyips/ has been very popular with children, and the exhibition has visited many small communities to delight children.  A very recent inhouse exhibition was mounted with the assistance of the CSIRO, Australia's national science research organisation, and included large numbers of insect specimen's from CSIRO's collections, as well as books and other items from the NLA collection.

The Library also undertakes some ambitious exhibitions which draw on the resources of other libraries as well as its own collections.  The most notable of these to date was the Treasures of the World's Great Libraries exhibition in 2001-2002 (http://www.nla.gov.au/worldtreasures/html/intro.html).  This exhibition, as the name suggests, gathered together priceless items from many libraries and some other cultural institutions, providing both Australian and international visitors with an unmatched opportunity to see some of the most significant items held in international collections.  Such exhibitions are a major undertaking, and several years of preparation were involved.  Among the issues which had to be examined and worked through were:
• What items can be included in such an exhibition, where are they held, and will they be made available for an exhibition?
• How are unique items such as Einstein's original manuscript with the formula E=mc2, or a papyrus fragment from thousands of years ago to be transported?
• What environmental and security conditions must be met?
• How can insurance for such an exhibition be put in place?
• How can the treasures be best displayed for viewing by the many thousands who will want to see them?

Libraries and other institutions around the world recognised the unique nature of this exhibition, and worked with the National Library of Australia to make this the most successful exhibition ever by an Australian library.  Over the course of the three month exhibition, over 115,000 visitors viewed the 160 items on display.  To accommodate the large number of visitors, the Library's exhibition gallery was open 22.5 hours per day towards the end of the exhibition period.  Staff freely volunteered their time to work through the night to enable this to happen - it was a most exciting time to be working at the National Library of Australia!  Visitors queued for many hours, some sleeping outside the building overnight, and were amazed and delighted that there was no entry fee. The exhibition was the Library's 100th anniversary gift to the nation.

For this exhibition, as with many others, the Library produced an excellent companion publication, with much detail about the exhibits which could not be reproduced on the labels accompanying items in the exhibition itself.  These are sold in the Library's bookshop, through the online shop (http://www.nla.gov.au/onlineshop/) and also through some commercial bookshops.
 
 
  Staff photographer. Visitors queued at night (left) and by day (right) to enter the Treasures exhibition in 2001-2002.

Another very major exhibition in being planned at present.  This will open in December 2005, and will exhibit treasures of the State and Territory libraries of Australia.  Unlike the Treasures of the World's Great Libraries, the new exhibition will tour the country after its opening in the National Library, and Australians will be able to see the exhibition in their own State or Territory library.  Like the original Treasures exhibition, there is an enormous amount of planning required to collect together the display items, and the tour component, while a great opportunity to promote the major public libraries, is very complex.

The National Library of Australia is planning a permanent treasures gallery, to provide a suitable exhibition space for long-term display of some of the Library's most significant items.

The National Library of Australia also lends material from its collections to other institutions for exhibition purposes.  This does require that borrowers request items well in advance, to allow for any necessary conservation work to be done, and for appropriate transport, security, environmental and other requirements to be worked through. There are loan conditions outlined in http://www.nla.gov.au/policy/condloans.html. 

Please visit the NLA's online exhibitions at http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/

Sandra Henderson
National Library of Australia
shenders@nla.gov.au