John Metcalfe's upper-working-class origins, administrative pragmatism and personal egocentricity made him an unlikely chief librarian. Entering the profession by accident, elevated in 1931 to second-in-charge of the Public (later State) Library of New South Wales by the connivings of his superior, and dogged at first with a publicly diffident personality, he became a leading figure of the Free Library Movement (FLM) in the 1930s, and only later the well known educator, writer and state librarian. The FLM made books and information available to a much wider public by its pressure on government for funding. Metcalfe's involvement in national and international library cooperation from the 1940s to the 1960s widened his earlier New South Wales focus. Despite his eccentricities and flaws there was a strong democratic focus in his writings on how to systematise library holdings through coherent cataloguing principles, something not always apparent in the 1990s with its cyberspeak librarianship.
BT - Australian Academic & Research Libraries IS - 1 LA - English N2 -John Metcalfe's upper-working-class origins, administrative pragmatism and personal egocentricity made him an unlikely chief librarian. Entering the profession by accident, elevated in 1931 to second-in-charge of the Public (later State) Library of New South Wales by the connivings of his superior, and dogged at first with a publicly diffident personality, he became a leading figure of the Free Library Movement (FLM) in the 1930s, and only later the well known educator, writer and state librarian. The FLM made books and information available to a much wider public by its pressure on government for funding. Metcalfe's involvement in national and international library cooperation from the 1940s to the 1960s widened his earlier New South Wales focus. Despite his eccentricities and flaws there was a strong democratic focus in his writings on how to systematise library holdings through coherent cataloguing principles, something not always apparent in the 1990s with its cyberspeak librarianship.
PY - 1998 SP - 42 EP - 50 T2 - Australian Academic & Research Libraries TI - John Metcalfe: Librarian by Accident, Eccentric by Nature, Democratic by Instinct VL - 29 ER -