Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, I was in the library looking for a book for an assignment about the US civil rights movement when I happened across another book, located on the same shelf – Negroes with Guns.

Negroes with Guns is a somewhat forgotten tract of the early civil rights movement, but was a key text for the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. It provided a bridge between the southern tradition of self-defence and the later Black Power movement. The book was so fascinating, I went on to do an honours thesis based on that topic.

Later, when I was undertaking my librarianship studies, I learnt that allowing for serendipitous discovery is an intended feature of the Dewey decimal system.  These collections and their connections are why academic libraries are so treasured by their patrons.

But are their days numbered? University libraries seem to be first in the sights of administrators looking to save a quick buck.

With a recent Melbourne University “business improvement program” proposing more cuts, around 50 library positions will have been lost there in the last five years – around one in five. The most recent casualty looks to be the Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library, although a robust campaign by the Graduate Music Society has gathered nearly 2,000 signatures to an online petition against the cuts.

The Sydney University library is also under threat. Up to 156 staff (around 60 percent of the workforce) are facing redundancy, as well as the closure of four library branches and restrictions on library services.

Librarians are concerned about the services they offer, as well as their jobs. One Sydney University librarian told Red Flag: “There’s no conceivable way that the Library will be able to keep up with the current standard of services for things like shelving of books, staffing information desks, document delivery requesting, making course reading material available etc. I can only see that there is going to be either a reduction in services available or a reduction in quality.”

At Sydney University, librarians and their supporters have responded to the plans. A 13 August protest of students, staff and well-known authors like David Malouf was attended by 300. 

Malouf was also involved in a recent and successful campaign to save the Mitchell Library, an iconic reading room in the State Library of New South Wales. As in many academic libraries around the world, the books were moving out and the coffee vendors were moving in. But a campaign that garnered around 10,000 signatures made management back down and agree to an acceptable compromise.

University and library managements are quick to use the excuse of technological change to justify cutting staff and services – after all, who needs or reads books these days? This attitude is short-sighted. If it is used merely as an excuse to slash staff, libraries will lose the ability to positively shape the outcomes of technological change as it occurs.

Librarians don’t just re-shelve the books you’ve borrowed. We work behind the scenes with academics and others to open up new digital learning spaces, to develop information literacy and design new ways of learning and presenting research. Without us, who will design the digital equivalent of on-shelf browsing to enable serendipitous discoveries in the future?

“The inefficiencies that the changed processes have caused are mind-boggling”, said one Sydney University librarian whose job is threatened. “If people were left to get on with their work and were treated with respect, things would be vastly different and significantly better.”