Significance Assessment Report

With the generous support of the National Library's Community Heritage Grant Scheme, we commissioned a Significance Assessment of our collection in December 2014. The assessment was carried out by eminent South Australian historian, Dr Susan Marsden. Dr Marsden's report has been received by Friends of the Launceston Mechanics' Institute and her all-important 'Statement of Significance' is reproduced in full below.

Anyone wishing to download the complete report and appendices may do so using the following links which also appear under LINKS in the sidebar.

Significance Assessment of the Launceston Mechanics' Institute Collection (2.85mb)

Appendices (1.72mb)

Statement of Significance

The Launceston Mechanics Institute collection is a historically significant collection of high value. The collection is primarily of historical significance as a rich and now rare set of books and periodicals dating mainly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that comprised the larger part of the library of a major mechanics institute in an important regional city in Australia, and illustrating the reading habits, information sources and connections of a colonial and non-metropolitan city, and its international and British empire connections. This largely intact and extensive Institute collection also retains (as a separate collection, at QVMAG) most of the associated Institute records. There appears to be only one comparable (but smaller) collection in Australia, that of the Ballaarat Mechanics Institute.

While the Collection in its entirety is of most significance it has many significant individual items, including a first edition of Middlemarch, books inscribed to and donated by founding settlers (as described in detail in Part 2), and many other individual books and sets of periodicals that are ‘collectables’ of some value.

Mechanics Institutes played a vital role in Australia’s cultural development, particularly in regional towns and cities. One of the most important of them was the Launceston Mechanics Institute. In operation from 1842 until 1929, and as an institute membership-owned library until 1945, this was one of the earliest mechanics’ institutes, ultimately one of the largest, and with the retention of a substantial part of its literature and archival collections, one of the most enduring institute libraries in Australian history. Munn and Binns, two of the most influential figures in the history of Australian libraries both highly rated the LMI library as the best of any library outside the capital cities, and as probably the best surviving institute library in Australia. 

From the accession registers around 46,000 items were acquired between 1842 and 1945. Some 20,000 books and 2,000 periodicals survive from this library, together with the Institute’s records and some furniture and other objects. The two most closely comparable Institute collections in Australia are those of the Adelaide Circulating Library (at the SSL) and the Ballaarat Mechanics Institute collection (Victoria), but the LMI collection is of earlier provenance than both, is more representative of an institute library than Adelaide’s, and is larger than the Ballaarat collection.

This significance assessment has confirmed that the size, quality, scope age and provenance of the LMI collection places its importance equal to or above any similar collection in Australia, and hence its national significance. The LMI Collection is not only the most substantial and comprehensive Institute library to have survived in an Australian regional centre from before 1850, but appears to be the most substantial and comprehensive library collection to have survived from the entire period of the flourishing of mechanics institutes in Australia, between the 1840s and the 1940s.

In their CHG application, FOLMI quoted specialists in this field, Adjunct Professor Wallace Kirsop and Pam Baragwanath. Kirsop stated:

The Launceston Mechanics Institute collection, despite all its vicissitudes, is clearly the most substantial one to have survived in a regional centre from before 1850. Indeed Adelaide is the only other one of comparable longevity and it is of course, metropolitan. Ballarat and to a lesser extent Bendigo offer collections of impressive scope begun in the second half of the nineteenth century. Consequently Launceston has claims to be unique, and its collection is vital in my view to the heritage of the whole country. After all we have lost the holdings of older institutes in Hobart, Sydney and Melbourne, not to mention Geelong. In short Launceston is a special case of national significance.

Pam Baragwanath made a similar observation (see also 1.2.2).  This SA not only confirms those specialist opinions, but adds to the unique status of the LMI collection. 

This is also the last intact collection of books from the major cultural institution in Launceston’s history. The significance of this Collection is increased by having institute stickers and rules still attached and by the preservation in Launceston (at QVMAG) of related administrative records, and catalogues, as well as histories. The Institute’s history is well-documented in newspapers and in unpublished and published accounts, most substantially in Whitfeld, History of the Launceston Mechanics' Institute and Public Library (1912), and Petrow, Going to the Mechanics (1998). Many of these works also provide important contextual information. The Launceston Mechanics Institute – and hence, the LMI collection - was significant not only because of its early date, longevity and scale, but because the associated records of the LMI have survived, and that rich documentation is supported by several published histories, as well as unpublished research and news reports.