Lynley Fowler has retired after 50 years at Whanganui Library. Photo/Bevan Conley
Lynley Fowler worked at the Whanganui District Library for more than 50 years before retiring last Friday. She speaks to Zaryd Wilson and reflects on five decades of change.
The reluctant librarian has retired.
Just over 50 years ago Lynley Fowler walked into the Alexander Library to start what was meant to be a temporary job.
"I didn't want to work in a library," she says.
Lynley left Whanganui Girls College in 1966, at the end of sixth form, and had a book binding apprenticeship at Meteor Printers lined up.
"But my parents were worried I was going to stay at home doing absolutely nothing.
"So I was only meant to be here for three months until the apprenticeship came up."
Maybe that's why when she started at the library on February 6, 1967 she didn't immediately take a shine to the job.
"You were on your feet the entire day. Heck, my first day there was three mail runs down to town," she says.
"By the end of the first week I was wondering if there was some way I could hand in my notice."
But that all changed after about three weeks.
She canned the idea of the apprenticeship and had decided this was where she would stay.
It was a steep learning curve as a library assistant.
"When I started you started with absolutely no knowledge and you were a junior, you worked your way into different tasks.
"Now they sort of hatch fully fledged and they can do any old task."
To be officially considered a librarian people needed to pass the Librarians Certificate and that was a long time coming for Lynley.
It was a three-year course, mostly by correspondence, with block courses at Wellington Teachers College.
"I failed miserably the first time I went for the certificate.
"I didn't even get past the preliminary exam."
She didn't attempt it again until 1990, this time as an adult student, which she says was a much better experience.
By then she knew every part of the library operation and was much more motivated.
It didn't feel like going to school.
"I never had an 'A' in my life at secondary school but I was getting a few at library school."
Lynley has done almost every job in the library except cataloguer and manager.
"The cataloguing takes a different sort of a brain and I haven't got it.
"You have to think differently so I take my hat off to the cataloguer over there."
She enjoyed working in acquisitions: "All the cartons came in and it was like Christmas every day."
But her favourite job has been working in heritage.
"I love the digging, the delving, the sleuthing," she says.
"Finding people and local histories.
"Oh, I'd love to be a time traveller. I would go back and ask some people where did you put this, why did you do that?"
A look back through Lynley's five decades at the library is kind of like time travel.
There was the switch to decimal currency, the introduction of GST and she recalls many significant world events through where she was at the library.
One was the first moon landing in 1969.
"I was a standing over there," she says pointing to a chair near the entrance to the Alexander Library.
"First time we were ever allowed a radio in the library. We'd be pushing our trolley of books and we'd come and listen a bit more.
"It took them hours to land and get out of the spaceship."
During Lynley's half century at the library she has seen the whole concept of what a library is change bit by bit.
"We were here for books and it was very studious," she says.
"The last 'silence in the library' sign was taken down around about the time I started but you were still expected to be a little bit decorous.
"It is different nowadays. People's expectations are different.
"We still have a few people that come up and say 'you have to do something about all that noise at the children's end'.
"But I'm thinking it's so fantastic to see the children having fun, enjoying themselves."
Lynley has seen the introduction of paperbacks, vinyl records, CDs, computers, coffee machines and couches, all unthinkable when she started.
"Having coffee in a library, goodness gracious me, you didn't have food anywhere near a book," she says.
"And I can remember the upheaval when we got our first paperbacks."
She says people didn't appreciate ratepayers money being spent on "such trash".
"Because they were cheap. Because the binding wasn't nice and leather bound or didn't have a shiny dust jacket."
People's tastes have broadened too.
"We hadn't been shook awake back then.
"Back in the 1960s we supplied good solid English stuff and there's still people around who won't read an American author. Not a lot though.
"Now people come in and they want this Scandinavian author or this Russian author."
But no change has impacted on libraries more than the internet.
"I can remember we were taken through to Massey to see a demonstration of the internet," Lynley says.
"They couldn't get it to work. The computer wouldn't go and we quietly went to sleep down the back.
"We came away thinking that will never catch on. All of us agreed, good afternoon out, but that won't work.
"Look at us now."
Now the internet is a vital and necessary part of the library.
"And the Government has actually specified that," she says.
"That these free computers are to be in public libraries. It brings the library back to being a source of information and entertainment."
The internet has changed the nature of research.
"Now people will go to Google first and it's only when they need something deeper or something really old that they come into the library."
In 1980 the library expanded with the Davis Central City Library opening just across the road on Queens Park.
As it is today, that became the lending part of the library while the old library became the Alexander Heritage and Research Library.
"We'd outgrown this building."
The money for the Davis Library came from the S M Davis Trust and a public fundraising campaign which Lynley remembered walking the streets and door knocking for.
"Whanganui has been extremely well blessed by benefactors," Lynley says.
"Council has not paid for any of its public buildings; the museum, the Alexander Library, the Davis Library, the Sarjeant Gallery. Even the Memorial Hall was kicked off by a grant.
"Of course the council put some money in, the council maintains them once we've got them."
Since the opening of the Davis, Lynley has spent the 37 years working between the two buildings atop Queens Park.
"It'd be nice if we were all in the same building but we're only across the road about 20 yards and that walk I think is our health," she says.
"A little bit of fresh air and a minute amount of exercise."
And despite the constant changes she believes libraries will always be around.
"It's the public face for a lot of things. It is kind of the meeting place of city information."
And even in retirement she will still been seen around the library.
She plans to volunteer and there's a few projects she wants to see through such as digitising of the biographical index.
So she's not leaving, really.
And as reluctant as she was early on she never seriously considered it.
"I never found anything else actually," she says.
"If I had I would've been searching the papers trying to see if there was something that looked like me.
"But apart from that initial few months this always looked like me."
