Human Knowledge in the Age of Information

by Professor Peter Doherty

It is a considerable honour to be invited to give the second Keith Murdoch oration, and a pleasure to do this in the presence of Dame Elisabeth and members of the family. The inaugural Lecturer was, of course, Rupert Murdoch, who argued strongly for the central importance of higher education, science and innovation for Australia’s future. That message, which is as important now as when he spoke in 2001, is one that I’ve also tried to push. His advocacy from a position of real influence was very welcome.

This evening, I will hit some of those same buttons but, in order to avoid feeling like a parrot, will change the emphasis a little and talk more about information and knowledge. This is a vast and complex subject, so I will focus my thoughts on different types of libraries, both ancient and modern. Some parts of this will be more familiar than others.

The basic character of a society is reflected in the strength and relevance of its major public institutions. The fact that we are here this evening is a measure of our regard for one such great resource, the State Library of Victoria. All of us can take both pride and pleasure in the recent restoration of the magnificent glass-domed reading room, part of a $190 million program that began in 1990 and is due to be completed by 2007.

The libraries and museums of the nation hold, and provide access to, the archives and collections that tell us about what we are and where we have come from. The information that they preserve, whether it is the relics of life forms that are now extinct or all the copies of every major newspaper (extant or not), is available to be mined by future generations of researchers and historians. They are the traditional repositories of human wisdom and knowledge.

This Library is now 150 years old. The collection when the founding Chairman of Trustees, the jurist Redmond Barry, appointed Augustus Tulk as the first librarian comprised less than 4000 volumes. The current count is somewhere around five million, including 100,000 maps, 22,500 sound recordings, 670,000 pictorial items and 6500 linear metres of  manuscripts.

The idea of the Library as an institution of public education and record would have been as familiar to Sir Redmond as it is to us. He died in 1880, the year that the first telephone exchange opened in Melbourne. Even if he had been Methuselah-like and lived till 1980, he would still have been a little bemused by the idea of an annual budget that includes 12.5 percent  for the acquisition of electronic resources.

Though Sir Redmond would have been fully aware of photographs, telegrams, the typewriter and the flatbed/cylinder printing press, he would never have encountered a photocopier, ridden in an automobile, seen a computer or sat through his latest reincarnation as the hanging judge in a Ned Kelly movie. What would he have made of terms like 'search engine' and 'Google'?

We now talk of librarians as information specialists. Libraries are no longer looked at as collections of books, prints and papers, though this remains an important function. The idea that the library is a portal to physically remote databases and information systems is both revolutionary if we talk about our world as it was 30 years ago, and totally familiar if we consider the realities of today. All the major newspapers now have weekly information technology supplements. This Library received over two million online visits last year.