Doors open on new era for National Library

Doors open on new era for National Library

The National Library building in Wellington has today reopened to the public after a three year closure for essential refurbishment.

The Molesworth Street building was closed to the public in December 2009, to address major safety and storage problems that were threatening the Library’s billion-dollar heritage collections, particularly those held by the Alexander Turnbull Library.

“This huge project has been delivered on-time and within budget,” says National Librarian, Bill Macnaught.

“The doors reopen on a very different National Library than three years ago. While the Molesworth Street building itself has undergone an extraordinary renovation, the transformation to the institution of the National Library of New Zealand has also been profound.

“The Library’s most important responsibility is to make the knowledge in our keeping freely and easily available to all New Zealanders.

“The closure allowed more resources to be directed into an extensive digitisation programme that has now seen more than 250,000 images, two million historical newspaper pages and thousands of hours of digital recordings made accessible on-line to people across New Zealand and around the world.

“Our new website makes it even easier to search and view the Library’s collections.

“For those that want to see ‘the real thing’, the newly refurbished Library building offers superb facilities for researchers, students and the casual visitor. We have more space than ever to showcase our taonga and we look forward to attracting even more people when the Treaty of Waitangi and other important founding documents are moved here, in a year’s time,” said Bill Macnaught.

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