Ep.3 Bill Macnaught — a librarian’s life

Speakers

Mary Hay, Seán McMahon, Bill Macnaught

Mary Hay: Kia ora and welcome to the Library Loudhailer, the monthly podcast of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa. My name is Mary Hay, and together with Seán McMahon we'll be sharing some of the unique voices and stories from our library staff and collections.

Seán McMahon: Today we have a very special guest on the show. Bill Mcnaught is the retiring National Librarian of the National Library of New Zealand. Kiai ora and welcome Bill.

Mary Hay: Bill, I wondered if we could start by asking you, why did you choose to become a librarian?

Bill Macnaught: So I graduated — well, I actually started university in the '60s. And so I come from an era where there was quite a strong student movement, I suppose, that was quite suspicious of the world of capitalism. And I thought it was not a path that I wanted to pursue, going into big business, anything like that. I suppose, bluntly, both my parents were in public service, in the broader sense of the word.

And my mother was a teacher. My father was Church of Scotland minister, and he had a huge study full of books that, as a kid, I suppose, looking back, it was quite an inspiration. It was a world of discovery going into his study and reading those books. And when you added it all up, the idea of going to work in libraries appealed to me — certainly, wasn't anything to do with filthy lucre. I didn't have any ambition to make lots of money. And actually, I didn't have that much ambition other than having a fairly steady job doing things that were good for the world.

Seán McMahon: Whereabouts was the university you studied in, Bill?

Bill Macnaught: I got an MA from the University of St. Andrews and did my postgraduate diploma in librarianship at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

Seán McMahon: Right.

Mary Hay: And were you a lecturer on libraries?

I was a visiting professor. When I was in the northeast of England, I had the honor of being invited to become a visiting professor at the University of Northumbria.

Seán McMahon: So can you tell us about your career in the UK, and then move into Taranaki before the role you picked up in the National Library?

Bill Macnaught: So I started my career in my hometown of Stirling as a graduate trainee-- did that for a year, turned up for my first day of work wearing a suit and tie, and was immediately set to work helping load boxes onto a van and touring round our branch libraries, dropping boxes off, picking up boxes. So that was the last day I wore a tie a suit for many, many years.

And yeah, I suppose I did make the mistake at one stage, I suppose, of telling my boss, the county librarian-- when she asked me after a couple of weeks, how was I getting on with my new job, and I said to her, "well, I have to say, so far, all that's really been required of me is being able to count to 10 and know my alphabet". And she probably thought that was a little bit too smartassed an answer.

But no, I had a great respect for her. Betty Liversidge was her name. She got an MBE for her services to school libraries in particular. And I have to say, I was brought up with the luxury of having a school with a good school library and a professional school librarian, and I just took it for granted that all schools had good libraries, good librarians.

And that wasn't the case throughout the country, as I later discovered. And sadly, it's certainly not the case in New Zealand either. Moved from Stirling after — well, my first job was in reference work and bibliographic services, I suppose you might say, ordering lots of new books, which was great fun. And then I went and became a branch librarian in Bridge of Allan.

And Bridge of Allan was quite a nice suburb in the catchment area of the University of Stirling, so we got lots of academics coming in asking for exotic books about all sorts of different subjects, as well as your average member of the public. And that was great. That's where I really served my apprenticeship and learned what being a librarian in the front line serving the public was all about — not always pleasant.

And people tend to think that working in a library's a nice quiet job, but it has its moments, as most librarians know, that can be quite challenging at times — but also, really rewarding — that whole thing about going into something that was genuinely of value to the public. And I used to get really nice feedback from customers just saying how much they appreciated the work of the public library —really rewarding.

Then I suppose a little bit of ambition kicked in and I moved to Gateshead to become information services librarian. That was in 1984. And my first job as information services librarian was picking up an idea around the shopping and information service that Gateshead Council had developed with Tesco, where Tesco was doing home delivery.

And along with that, the library was providing a community information service using view data, which was like Prestel, which was really basic telematics, where you were using the technology of television. And pixels were huge pixels, and you had that really blocky text.

So we were developing community information using that really clunky technology, but it worked in terms of being able to send information to our branch libraries about who the emergency pharmacy was on any particular given day. And it was really quite ...

Mary Hay: So that was providing community information for people. That sounds amazing.

Bill Macnaught: Yeah, pioneering stuff. We worked with the Citizens Advice Bureau to provide advice in all our branch libraries.

Seán McMahon: Gateshead is around 200,000 people?

Bill Macnaught: That's right, on the other side of the River Tyne from Newcastle.

Seán McMahon: And what would be the population of Newcastle?

Bill Macnaught: It was about 250,000.

Seán McMahon: Right.

Mary Hay: And what's the socioeconomic makeup of Gateshead?

Bill Macnaught: So Gateshead was very blue collar. In fact, there is a notorious quote about Gateshead being a dirty back lane leading to Newcastle.

Mary Hay: So that must have been quite a change from your first...

Bill Macnaught: Yeah... very different kind of community from Stirling.

Mary Hay: Yeah.

Bill Macnaught: Yeah, but I have to say, I've got a lot of respect for Gateshead Council. For many years before my time as the head of libraries there, the councillors needed no persuading the public libraries had a value as a community facility. They very carefully protected the book fund that many libraries were quick to cut when times got tight.

And they saw it very much as Andrew Carnegie saw public libraries, as the poor man's university, using your public library to advance yourself. So Gateshead was very much a rock-solid Labour council. And they were very proud of what I would describe as popular culture.

So parks and gardens were, got lots of support. They won lots of awards at Chelsea Flower Show for the excellence of their park staff. Yeah, they saw public libraries not as a, not as something intellectual, but as a popular cultural resource for everyone.

Seán McMahon: And you moved on to be the director.

Bill Macnaught: Yeah. So I worked my way through the ranks pretty quickly-- just right place at the right time with my bosses leaving-- and discovered myself in the role of director of libraries and arts, 1991, and yeah, started playing with all sorts of arts projects as well.

Seán McMahon: And that led you into the Angel of the North, these arts projects?

Bill Macnaught: Yeah. So Gateshead had a tradition of art and public places as part of what they called the greening of Gateshead-- so changing it from dark satanic mills that had spoiled the landscape and coal mines that were still smoldering underground, lots of work spent rehabilitating the landscape. And as part of the relandscaping in the countryside, we had site-specific public art commissions, and the Angel of the North was simply the piece de resistance for the year of visual arts in 1996.

So we decided that we were going to do something spectacular. And a lot of people hadn't noticed that we were doing things in the visual arts, but we had artists like Richard Deacon, Andy Goldsworthy, seriously big names in contemporary visual arts not too many people had paid any attention to it. And then, when the Angel came along, I thought, oh my God. Why are we doing this?

I said, well, essentially, it's just part of the programme. But it was a scale. Nobody was going to miss the Angel of the North, whereas it was quite easy to literally walk past one or two of the other artworks without noticing.

Mary Hay:_ And it was quite controversial. Would that be true to say?

_Bill Macnaught: Just a tad, yeah--

Mary Hay:_ What was the controversy?

Bill Macnaught: Well, all sorts of things were pointed at the Angel of the North. The only thing they didn't accuse it of was causing global warming. But they said it would block out the sun. They said it would stop television signals being received, seriously. We had to get engineers to demonstrate that it was not going to interfere with television signals.

And I kept making reference to the,- all the fuss that Paris saw around the Eiffel Tower construction, people marching in the street in Paris, demanding that it should not happen. And we had a really strong campaign against the angel. For three years running, the political opposition in the council, said vote for us and we will stop the angel. That was their main argument for voting for the opposition party.

My chairman was very happy to say that his majority went up as a result of the fuss about the angel. And there was a lovely moment when he was on live television with the leader of the opposition from the council on TV arguing about the angel. And the leader of the opposition said, we love sculpture, just not this one. So the interviewer said, well, what would you rather instead of this?

And they said, well, something more appropriate to Gateshead. And interviewer said, like what? And my chairman, being very politically astute, pressed home the attack and said, ‘yeah, go on’. Tell the viewers. What would you have instead of the angel? And the leader of the opposition said ‘a leaping goat’. And I think, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he probably regretted saying that. So at the next council meeting, he was presented with a T-shirt with a leaping goat.

Mary Hay:_ Oh, no.

Bill Macnaught: We had some good fun. At the same time, people were saying that it would cause major accidents on the motorway, with people driving out the motorway and going, oh my goodness, look at that, and crashing their cars. So we got the AA and the police to say, actually, it's a good thing having things that remind people that they are actually in a particular place on the road, instead of just driving up the motorway thinking about all sorts of other things, rather than the environment in which they're driving.

Seán McMahon: Did Newcastle want to respond with building their own stature of some sort?

Bill Macnaught: No, they didn't do that much in terms of public sculpture, like we did. Newcastle at the time had more of a reputation for what you might describe as high culture. So they were on a track to build a new concert hall that they'd been talking about for 20 years. Instead, when they finally showed no sign of getting on and funding the building of a new concert hall, I said to my colleagues in the Arts Council that, well, maybe Gateshead Council would be ready for their next big project.

Mary Hay:_ Wow.

Bill Macnaught: So we did. But before that, we built the Center for Contemporary Art, the BALTIC. And that was 43 million pounds of lottery money to refit an old flour mill for the biggest space for contemporary visual art outside of London in the UK. And then we got 70 million for the concert hall on our side of the river designed by Sir Norman Foster. It was quite exciting times.

Mary Hay:_ Yeah, sounds like amazing times. So what was it that attracted you to move to New Zealand?

Bill Macnaught: Well, we were bidding to be European capital of culture. By this time, we were doing this in partnership with our colleagues across the river. So Newcastle Gateshead was bidding to be European Capital of Culture for 2008. And Liverpool were telling everybody that they had won it back in 2000, yeah, actually, 1999. They were going around saying, we are going to be European Capital of Culture.

It was going to be in the UK, so it was a competition among British cities to host Capital of Culture in 2008. And so for several years, we were running a campaign to be chosen as European Capital of Culture Liverpool's big argument was that they had the Beatles as part of their contribution to--

Mary Hay:_ Yeah, but you had the angel.

Bill Macnaught: --European culture. Yeah. Liverpool was chosen-- nothing to do with the fact that Tony Blair's wife was from Liverpool. Anyway, Liverpool needed it more than we did.

Mary Hay:_ You gave it to them.

Bill Macnaught: Well, seriously, by the time we got to the decision point, we had made so much progress with culture, where, instead of the angel attracting all the criticism about what a waste of public money, the newspapers had given us a really hard time about the angel. But by the time we were bidding for Capital of Culture, they had come round completely in support of investing in culture.
And in that respect, it was kind of-- well, we don't need to be called European Capital of Culture because we've already made that significant shift.

I had got the Regional Development Agency to acknowledge that creative thinking was the most important single transferable skill set for the knowledge economy and the future prosperity of the region. So when you're getting captains of industry, and big business, and government leaders all saying, yeah, actually, we get it, we understand the value of culture, there was a view that we didn't need the accolade of European Capital of Culture.

Seán McMahon: So did you see an ad for Puke Ariki in the local paper there, or did you just decide you'd head down to the southern hemisphere on a wing and a prayer?

Bill Macnaught: OK, so the point of that ramble about European Capital of Culture is that, when we,-it was announced that we hadn't got it, it was the first time in my whole time in Gateshead where, instead of being on an escalator of success, we had reached a point where, oh, we didn't get something that we'd been trying to do.

Seán McMahon: Working for.

Bill Macnaught: And I thought, well, OK, I could happily spend the rest of my career staying in Gateshead, resting on my laurels, because having built the Angel, the BALTIC, and the concert hall, we weren't going to get a lot more money to invest in capital infrastructure for culture. And in the meantime, I'd come out to New Zealand for my 50th birthday..

Mary Hay:_ Oh, you'd been here. Right.

Bill Macnaught: ...and visited my niece in Nelson. My birthday's at the end of December, so lying on a beach in Abel Tasman National Park, I was thinking, you could get used to this lifestyle.

Mary Hay:_ Right.

Bill Macnaught: And actually, the day before the announcement about Capital a Culture, I was talking to a Kiwi colleague in the UK on the train from London up to the northeast of England, and she said to me, if you weren't doing what you're doing now, what would you like to do? Knowing she was a Kiwi, I said, well, actually, I wouldn't mind doing some consultancy work, maybe some day in New Zealand.

And she said, well, New Zealand we'd love to have you, I'm sure. And I went to school with the Prime minister, Helen Clark, and I know the High Commissioner, who's a personal friend. And if you want to have a chat, just say the word. And I'm going, yeah, right. Yeah, that's going to happen. Anyway, I was still focused on winning Capital of Culture, and so I just put it to the back of my mind. Yeah, eventually, I phoned her up and said, you know that conversation we had on the train?

Mary Hay:_ Wow.

Bill Macnaught: And we had our cup of tea in the high commissioner's office in London. Russell Marshall was the High Commissioner, and he said to me, we've let strange people than you into the country. And I thought, OK, that's good. He said, where would you want to go in New Zealand? I said, well, I've got family in Nelson. And he's from Nelson.

Mary Hay:_ Wow.

Bill Macnaught: And so I'm thinking, well, that sounds that sounds like a plan. He said, leave your CV and we'll see what happens. I left a hardcopy CV. As it turns out, the head of immigration, who normally would have been there, but couldn't because his wife was ill that day, the head of immigration was from New Plymouth. And so when he saw my hardcopy CV, subsequently, he then contacted New Plymouth District Council and said, I know you're looking for some people to work at Puke Ariki Here's a CV.

No, actually didn't send the CV, just said, here's the email address for this guy who you might be interested in. So I got an email out the blue from New Plymouth, and I had to look up, where is New Plymouth because I...

Mary Hay:_ Wow, amazing.

Bill Macnaught: ...never heard of it. But by sheer coincidence, a few days before I got that email, I had just bought the DVD for Last Samurai and, of course.

Mary Hay:_ Oh, which was filmed here.

Bill Macnaught: ...suddenly realized that, actually, Last Samurai, I'll get to see what Taranaki looks like.

Mary Hay:_ Right.

Bill Macnaught: Well, I got to see what Mount Taranaki looked like, but the rest of it was...

Seán McMahon: Billy Connolly running around Taranaki.

Bill Macnaught: That's right. The cricket ground at Pukekura Park was where they were doing some of their military drills.

Mary Hay:_ Yeah.

Bill Macnaught: Anyway, so I emailed New Plymouth District Councils in response, said, ‘Here's my CV in soft copy’. And I got an email back saying, ‘Well, that's impressive’, which I thought was a good buying signal. And psychometric testing. Flew out for an interview couple of weeks later, and arrived on a Monday. On the Friday morning, I got offered a job. Friday lunchtime, I met the Governor General, who was visiting New Plymouth.

Mary Hay:_ You must have felt New Zealand was a really weird place, that we all know each other and...

Bill Macnaught: Yeah, great. Well, it gets better, because that afternoon was the opening of WOMAD, so Helen Clark was on the stage. Richie Havens was playing guitar as background music while I phoned Tom to tell my wife that we were moving to New Zealand.

Mary Hay:_ What did she said?

Bill Macnaught: She said, oh, we are, are we? I said, yes, we talked about this. She had a more important job than I had back in the northeast of England. She was in charge of European investment in the region. So all the Chief Executive those were very friendly, trying to get European funding from the account that my wife managed for the regional development agency.

It's one of these things, the so-called trailing spouse. Well, she actually had an important job at work to finish off. But now she's absolutely clear that it was the best movie ever made.

Mary Hay:_ Good move.

Seán McMahon: It was probably her decision, was it, now that she looks back?

Bill Macnaught: I know where you're coming from.

Seán McMahon: So how long were at Puke Ariki once you'd come out?

Bill Macnaught: Six years, started in 2005 and got this job in 2011. So one of the first conversations I had at Puke Ariki was, tell me what the important dates are in the history of Taranaki. 17th of March, 1860, first shots fired in the Taranaki Wars. So this was 2005. I said, OK, 2010 will be the 150th anniversary. Maybe we should plan an exhibition?

And I got a, ‘yeah, we could kind of reaction’. And we could write a book. I said, well, we could write a book and do an exhibition.

‘Yeah, we could.’

And of course, being the daft laddy just just the boat from the UK, I didn't realize how challenging doing an exhibition about Taranaki Wars was going to be.
It is possibly still the thing that's giving me the greatest sense of job satisfaction is, some months after we closed the Taranaki Wars exhibition in 2010, some guys in New Plymouth that I knew socially, Pākehā, descendants from the first settlers, first six ships in New Plymouth, they said to me, what lasting impact did I think the Taranaki Wars exhibition would have.

And I said, ‘Not sure it's going to have any lasting impact’.

He said, ‘Oh, no’. He said, ‘I can tell you that there are a lot of us who thought we knew our history, didn't really understand it until we went through that exhibition. And we finally get why there are still grievances to this day’.

And previously, it's been like, well, nothing to do with us. It happened 150 years ago. Build a bridge and get over it. So what he was saying was that actually, it had shifted the understanding about the history, which helped them understand the issues in society today. And he said it has made a lasting change. So if you needed evidence that museums and libraries can change lives, then that's a pretty good example.

And actually, much more important than building an angel.

Mary Hay:_ Yeah. I guess you had to really grapple with culture and heritage when you were doing that exhibition. So what are some of the things that you learned from that, and that you've learned over your whole time here, about cultural things and heritage things? What are the things that stand out for you?

Bill Macnaught: Well, I suppose one of the main things that I rapidly became aware of in Taranaki is, if you don't understand the history of Taranaki, it's pretty difficult to understand New Zealand today. And it's not just Taranaki history, of course. Yeah, the whole story around Parihaka, just so important for the history of New Zealand.

Needless to say, I made huge gaffes in the early years just not understanding the whole bicultural setup. I have to say, I had fantastic mentors and colleagues, particularly Lindsay MacLeod, who's a kaumatua. He very quickly established in our very first conversation that his grandfather was from Isle of Skye, MacLeod. And I said, ‘hm, my grandfather was MacLeod from the Isle of Skye as well’. Not the same person.

So we had, there was a really nice rapport that struck up with Lindsay from day one. And I was saying to Lindsay that we really want to open up the stories of our history, and that includes Māori sharing their stories with Pākehā And he said to me, ‘yeah, maybe the time has come when we can do that’.

And I was thinking, ‘oh, right, OK’. So it's obviously a deep-seated problem he says, stating the obvious now, deep-seated problem sharing history. And he said, ‘yeah, he was brought up in Parihaka’, and he had been told as a very small child, ‘Tell them nothing’. And I said, ‘From a Pakeha world of librarianship, my business is to open up knowledge for everyone to share’.

Actually, one of the events that we run around the Taranaki Wars program was I brought the Chief Executive of SILUP over from the UK, Bob McKee, who was actually a personal friend as well. But Bob was very staunch about freedom of access to information and freedom of expression. So it was that debate that was going on at a global level in IFLA. And yet half the world, mostly European, American librarians, saying, of course we need to open up knowledge and have freedom of expression.

And then you'd have half of the delegates at the IFLA Global Conference saying, ‘No, actually, you need to respect that, in some cultures, freedom of expression is not exactly welcome’. You get the whole Danish cartoon thing. That was actually one of the topics, hot topics of debate around that time.

Anyway, I brought Bob over and we hosted a mini-conference, I suppose, with colleagues from Te Rōpū Whakahau as well, talking about this idea of what we want to be able to share knowledge. And it's still, I think, one of our big challenges is that respect for different cultures.

At mu pōwhiri at Puke Ariki, I said that I saw that as one of the biggest challenges of our time globally is building that respect for difference, instead of what you've been witnessing in the United States for the last few years, that being able to coexist peacefully depends on a respect for different cultures, and if you don't understand the different cultures, and you just see it as alien, it's not a great thing.

Mary Hay:_ Do you think, in the National Library, that we have done that in the last wee while?

Bill Macnaught: We're moving in the right direction, still got a long way to go. If you think about the government's, and indeed the country's ambition around Crown/Māori relationships, still heaps to be done there. We are definitely still in that Pākehā space, government institution. And in my submission to NALI review a year or so ago, I was talking about the challenge around bicultural governance.

When I started at Puke Ariki, one of the kaumatua from Round the Mountain, Joe Broughton, kept asking me about bicultural governance of Puke Ariki. And to begin with, I didn't understand what he was driving that, but it comes from that same space of treaty partnership. And eventually, when I realized what he was hoping to achieve, I said, look, until the council is biculturally governed, Puke Ariki as part of the council, it's not going to be biculturally governed.

And the same way here, as part of government, until the Beehive is culturally, biculturally governed, the National Library's is not going to be biculturally goverened, whereas Nga Taonga Sound and Vision is biculturally governed. And so with NALI review, the idea of Ngā Taonga perhaps eventually becoming part of government, I'm thinking, well, that means you're going to offer up bicultural governance.

And when you look at the business that we're in, I think it actually does, looking to the future, I think it's about more bicultural governance of our business, rather than less.

So NALI has not landed yet, and I have no idea where that's going to land eventually, but I do think that there's a good question about whether or not the National Library would be better joining Ngā Taonga and bicultural governance space, rather than Ngā Taonga coming into a government department. That's still a debate to be had, I think.

Seán McMahon: So was that a big jump for you when you moved from Puke Ariki to the National Library? Because Puke Ariki is quite localized in the Taranaki area. And then you're moving to the National Library, which has a role for all libraries in New Zealand.

Bill Macnaught: Yes, it was a jump. All my career up until this job has been in local government. And I have to say, I thought I knew about bureaucracy until I came into this job. And the way that government works, the way the government has to work, is much more regimented about the way things are done. And a lot of that is about the level of accountability and transparency that people want from government. So it's understandable, but it's, at times, it can still be quite challenging for managers trying to move business along.

Mary Hay:_ And I guess you had more of a challenge because in the National Library, was it merged with DIA?

Bill Macnaught: Yep

Mary Hay:_ --along with Archives New Zealand

Bill Macnaught: Well we just had the Christchurch earthquakes, and we had just come into DIA in February 2011. So I started May 2011. As a new a group of a department, we were still trying to find our feet. And we had no proper financial reporting when I started in May, and yet I was going to be accountable for end-of-year financial results in June. So that was a little bit alarming that things had still not settled down properly then.

Mary Hay:_ Were there challenges and opportunities that the merger offered?

Bill Macnaught: Yeah. So at my interview, as you might expect, I was asked about, how would you exploit the advantages of coming into internal affairs? And there are still lots of opportunities that we can get leverage from, but have we actually capitalized on that? A lot of the opportunities, you struggle to deliver any of those kind of changes when you're spending so much of your time in global financial crisis, just firefighting mode.

Yeah, that's been probably the promise unfulfilled of coming into the bigger department. And you've still got lots of constructive conversations. In terms of IT, I suppose that would be one of the more obvious areas to look at, where there are certainly some pros and cons of us coming into the Department of Internal Affairs.

I have to say, our IT security has never been better. And I think we didn't fully understand some of the risks that we've been carrying unwittingly. So stuff like disaster recovery of our digital documentary heritage is still a work on. But we're, we've got heavy duty support from colleagues across the department and that sort of space.

Seán McMahon: He Tohu would have been one of the big projects during your tenure here.

Bill Macnaught: Well, He Tohu-- what is now He Tohu started off as my bright idea I think three weeks into the job, because we were still looking at the refit of this building.

Mary Hay:_ I'm seeing a theme here.

Bill Macnaught: Yeah. So when I looked at the plans for our revamped building, the ground floor was, the space that is now He Tohu was going to be full of microfiche, microfilm readers. And I thought, that's actually prime real estate, and I'm not sure that the best use of that footprint is filling it up with, it's an important part of the business, but really, do you want to put it front and center as you walk into the building, that's what you're looking at?

And I did think about the opportunity to do something a bit more valuable with that footprint. So for many years, that ground floor space lay blank. And understandably, lots of people were asking questions about, well, what a waste of space that is. And eventually, we were able to say, well, this is why we've been keeping that space free all these years is so that we could actually deliver He Tohu.

But it, as a project, it, yeah, it took a few guys to get it right. I'd have to say that was probably the low point, where the previous attempt to bring the treaty and the other documents into the building, when that failed, that was, yeah, that was a low point in my time as National Librarian, because well, apart from anything else, it burned up a lot of cash from our operating budget that had to be expensed on the failed capital project.

Yeah, so that was quite frustrating. But then, happy ending, with the opening of He Tohu, that was a highlight. To listen to Sonny Tau representing the Iwi leaders who were present for the opening,- and there were a lot of them present for the opening, for him to stand up and say to the acting Prime Minister at the time that, if you want to understand how government should work with Iwi, look no further than this project.

Mary Hay:_ Wow.

Bill Macnaught: Yes. Pretty powerful.

Mary Hay:_ That's amazing.

Bill Macnaught: Yeah. So--

Seán McMahon: And the work started with getting the next project to get every school in New Zealand to come down. That seems pretty successful.

Bill Macnaught: It's beginning to pick up at last. We're a long way yet from the Australian model, where it's actually expected that every school kid will visit Canberra as part of their time at school. We've got a long way to go there, but again, through the foundation' Te Puna Foundation, we've now got funding support and support from Air New Zealand for kids to be flown in from all four corners of the country.

And the team are doing a really great job at engaging schools. And word of mouth will spread, and I think more schools, more and more schools will see it as kind of a milestone that every, it's almost a rite of passage. Every Kiwi should understand the stories in He Tohu.

Mary Hay:_ Yeah.

Bill Macnaught: --kind of civics education.

Mary Hay:_ So what do you think the relationship is between the National Library and other libraries?

Bill Macnaught: Well, I've known for many years, before I got this job, I've known that lots of libraries around the country look to the National Library for leadership, but they don't want us to tell them what to do.

Mary Hay:_ It's tricky.

Bill Macnaught: And it's a fine balance, but I think we've actually-- because we've been in firefighting mode for so many years, we've not actually had a lot of scope to provide credible leadership in too many spaces. That's changing. And I know that, with the New Zealand library's partnership program that was funded in the budget this year as part of the COVID recovery package, we're getting quite strong messaging that public libraries in particular are looking to the library the National Library to be more active in that leadership space, not just pontificating about what they should be doing, but actually building more of that core infrastructure to support the work of libraries up and down the country.

So APNK, we are rolling out APNK to more libraries now. We've not been able to do that for the last nine years that much, really, but now we can. Kōtui has been growing, more and more libraries buying into that. So that kind of core infrastructure is something that I think we will be doing more of.
The idea, one knowledge network, one big library. I don't mean organizationally, though it will be the National Library running the local library services. But just being a bit more ambitious about the material support that the National Library can give to allow libraries at a local level to get on with what they do best.

Seán McMahon: And looking back to your early part of your career, school libraries here is a big, school services is a big part of the National Library.

Bill Macnaught: Yeah. And our last minister was particularly keen on seeing us rebuild the school service that had had some of the worst effects of the global financial crisis. And I'm pleased to say that our new minister is also very keen on supporting the work of school libraries.

Yeah. The whole reading theme in our strategic directions took some of our staff by surprise, struggling to understand why I elevated reading to the same level as power and knowledge. But our staff working in services to schools know how important it is that kids discover a love of reading for pleasure.

It is kind of challenging, because the reaction from most bureaucrats that I talk to in Wellington is, ‘Well, what's stopping them reading for pleasure? Who's stopping them from doing that?’.

But as we know, there's a bit more to it. And particularly, if kids come from a household where reading isn't valued, or indeed, sadly, some households where parents can't read, are kind of embarrassed about taking their kids to the library even. So we need to break down some of those barriers and just be a lot more positive about promoting the benefits of getting kids reading from the earliest age.

Mary Hay:_ Do you think you've had to argue for libraries with bureaucrats, that libraries have value? Has that been part of the role?

Bill Macnaught: Yes. I won't go into the gory detail, but yeah, there is definitely still a challenge with too many decision makers, not just in central government, local government. If I had $1 for every time I've heard a councillor say that libraries are a nice to have.

Mary Hay:_ How do you respond to that? What are your key points, your key arguments?

Bill Macnaught: Well, one of them is that whole point about reading-- that because it's not spectacular, it's not like going to the circus or going to a fantastic concert, the whole business of people reading is a kind of, generally speaking, a unspectacular activity. And it's going on, taken for granted in communities across the country. But it's when you understand the impact that, the difference between kids who are keen and reading for pleasure and kids who get no support in reading for pleasure, no encouragement, there is heaps of evidence that you are actually setting kids up to succeed absolutely directly as a result of being good readers.

And trying to get more of that argument across, so people like Stuart McNaughton, who's an advisor to the Ministry of Education, you need to use some of the science behind reading. But that's why our whole campaign around getting more kids reading is actually so important. It's not going to happen overnight, but we've now got the Reading Ambassador that the Prime Minister announced, that we finally find a way to fund that through the Te Puna Foundation.

And lots of people are supportive of it and the whole business of getting kids reading. So many organizations are doing their own thing, instead of having some kind of coherent program to get the message across to parents, to teachers, to governors, to counselors that investing, among other things, investing in public libraries is seriously an important part of the social infrastructure, not just a nice to have.

Seán McMahon: So do you have one thing that you would think is the single biggest challenge facing libraries, not just the National Library, but all libraries in the next 20 years? Is it the reading, or is it...

Bill Macnaught: Well, fundamentally, it's a perception of value. If people don't perceive value in what we do, then you're always going to be fighting an uphill battle. And the value that we deliver comes in different ways. So taonga for some people, the value of what we do in this building is about protecting the crucially important taonga.

Seán McMahon: Absolutely.

Bill Macnaught: And that in itself, for some people, would be a reason why they're happy to spend taxpayer dollars for us to do what we do. For other people, it's that access to knowledge. So if you talk to school teachers, indeed, if you talk to our new Minister, it seems that her main experience of the National Library is through the school library service that teachers value.

And that's frankly got not a lot to do with taonga. So in a school, if you want to find out about how volcanoes work or what happened in ancient Rome-- not a lot to do with New Zealand taonga. It's about sharing knowledge, making it easy for New Zealanders to get access to the knowledge that they need.

And for others, it's that love of reading. So you talk to Kate de Goldie and she is so passionate about the work that we do to get kids reading. And in itself, for Kate, that's worth the taxpayer dollars that goes into the National Library.

So it's that perception of value is different for different people.

Mary Hay:_ And how do you think digital comes into that? Because libraries are often thinking about, I go there, I see a book, and we've got the digital revolution, I guess you can still call it.

Bill Macnaught: Well, Papers Past is probably the easiest example to use, where there's a long list of people who say great things about Papers Past, including Eleanor Catton in her acknowledgments in The Luminaries even gives the URL. And we know that it has transformed the way that researchers can get access to detail about the past and New Zealand without having to turn the pages of every newspaper that we've got in the basement.

To begin, with digital in itself was a thing that increasingly, if you look 25 years out, it'd be nice to think that actually, we won't be talking about digital. It would just be the way that we work, that it's not, digital's not a thing. It's the content and the services that people get access to. And yes, they will be increasingly using digital as the way to do that.

Mary Hay:_ But it's not either or.

Bill Macnaught: No. Well, I don't think so.

Mary Hay:_ Yeah.

Bill Macnaught: And certainly, for the National Library, for many years to come, we will have taonga that will not be accessible digitally. Our ambition was that, by 2030, it's all going to be available digitally. But actually, I think that the realistic way of addressing that is going to be digitized on demand, and colleagues in Archives are doing a lot of work around that.

And we need to think carefully about how we can ramp up that offer of digitization on demand. Instead of saying, well, we've got a huge program of digitizing stuff that you might want, looking at it more at a micro level, if you've got a researcher that says, I want access to that, how do we make it easy for them to say, well, haven't got it right now, but we will digitize it and you can have access to it, even within a week, a month might be good enough. But simply saying, no, we haven't digitized it, but we've got all this other stuff that we've digitized that you'd be interested in...

Mary Hay:_ Interesting--

Seán McMahon: So for all the ones who are looking for a career, or a new career, or a change of career, would you recommend being a librarian as a good career choice?

Bill Macnaught: Well, not if you want to be rich-- but if you want a rewarding job where-- well, I think the people that will pursue a career in libraries won't need me to convince them that libraries are, we do good work for society. At times, we can take it too far, and it comes across as though we're doing God's work. And too often you hear librarians overclaiming the value of what libraries do for society, but I think the reality of what we do deliver is value enough.

Certainly, in my experience, there's been plenty of occasions where you think yeah, actually, you can go home and feel that you have made a good contribution to society.

Mary Hay:_ I've got two questions, and then we'll, I think we'll round it up. So have you got any advice for your successor, and what are you looking forward to in your retirement?

Bill Macnaught: Well, I'll give you the standard joke about advice for your successors, is that I should write three envelopes. And the advice is that, when something goes badly wrong, you open the first envelope. First envelope says, blame me. If it goes badly wrong again, you open up the second envelope, which says, I've ordered a review to make sure it will never happen again. And if it does happen again, you open the third envelope, and it says, start writing three envelopes.

Seriously, I'm sure that there will be occasions where people will quite happily say, well, it was that Bill Macnaught that did it. It's his fault. Knowing who my successor is now, I don't know that Rachel actually needs a lot of advice from me. I'm entirely confident that she is going to do a fantastic job.

I think probably my advice would be to look after herself, because you're not going to be much use to anybody if you're falling over. And it does take a certain amount of pacing. You could easily spend all your waking hours working on a job, and I don't think that's a recipe for long success. But Rachel's got her head screwed on. She knows that. As I say, I think she's going to do a great job and won't need a lot of advice from me.

Mary Hay:_ And what are you looking forward to in retirement?

Bill Macnaught: Well, on the one hand, I'm looking forward to spending more time in my happy place at the top of the South Island without having to worry about work. And the reality is that there has been plenty to worry about in the last nine years, not least of all with COVID. And COVID really brought home the responsibility that I have not just for the documentary heritage that we look after, but for the people who work here. And it was quite a stressful time for me, worrying about all of my staff.

Seán McMahon: So as a leader, would you say that's one of the hardest challenges you've had?

Bill Macnaught: The COVID--

Seán McMahon: The COVID period-- yeah.

Bill Macnaught: Yeah, absolutely, because it's a combination of unprecedented change in society, being aware that there are going to be varying levels of stress that everybody is experiencing, including me personally, with my own anxieties about my own family's well-being, and multiplying that by 300 souls across the library, and at the same time, knowing that there wasn't an awful lot that I could do about it.

But I'm just conscious of my responsibility to do whatever I could to help people get through the whole thing with some degree of sanity intact at the end of it all. And it was not easy for a lot of people. And we're not entirely out of the woods yet, but...

Mary Hay:_ And we thank you for what you did.

Bill Macnaught: Well, it doesn't feel like very much that I did, but the daily newsletters I actually quite enjoyed-- ended up being quite good fun sometimes thinking of daft things to entertain the troops.

Seán McMahon: And I think it has brought on other things, like remote teach-- not remote learning, but working from home, so--

Mary Hay:_ Remote working.

Seán McMahon: Remote working. And that has been embedded now and part of our culture here. So there's some changes have come of it.

Bill Macnaught: It's definitely here to stay. If you listen to Peter Hughes, head of the public service, he's crystal clear that there will come a time when we look back at how daft it was that we packed all these public servants into high-rise buildings in Wellington.

Quite how it's going to pan out, don't know. There will always be a need to have some people onsite in our main buildings, of course, particularly for us in the National Library. There will always be a need, I think, to value this as, maybe it's a bit highfalutin to describe it as a cathedral of culture, but it's that sort of thing. There is something special about the physical space that we have here, particularly the experience that have visiting He Tohu, but also looking at the real thing in the Turnbull Library.

Seán McMahon: Absolutely. OK, Bill. Well, I think we might wrap it up now.

Bill Macnaught: Thank you.

Seán McMahon: We'd like to thank you for your commitment and passion to the National Library and to libraries in general over the last 9 to 10 years here, and of course, with the six years before that in Puke Ariki. And thank you for agreeing to come in for The Library Loudhailer Podcast. And we wish yourself and Kate all the best in your retirements. And we do have some Scottish music to see you out. It is James Patterson Pipe-Major playing The Sailor's Hornpipe.

Bill Macnaught: Fantastic. Thank you.

Bagpipe music

Seán McMahon: Well, that's it for another episode of The Library Loudhailer. Thank you Bill for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us. A shout out to our sound engineer Jay Buzenberg, our producer Aaron Wanoa and to you our wonderful audience. Join us again next month for more audio stories from the Library. You can find details for each epsiode on our show notes on the National Library website. To see us out we are playing James Patterson's version of The Sailor's Hornpipe courtesy of the Archive of New Zealand Music.

Ka kite ano.