page break

Introduction.

Short as this pamphlet is it requires a brief introduction to explain its origin and purport.

In 1884, I spent some months in Australia, and as I visited the chief towns in all the colonies except West Australia, I inspected the various libraries therein, and recorded all the information which I could gather with regard to them in a paper, which I sent to England, and which was read for me at the Annual Meeting of the Library Association of the United Kingdom, held at Dublin, in October, 1884.

That paper, owing to various causes for which I am not to blame, awaits the publication of the annual volume of the Transactions of the Association for 1884.

After leaving Australia, I spent nearly three months in New Zealand, going through the islands from north to south, and visiting all the chief libraries, and the results of my investigations are contained in this pamphlet.

With the exception of those marked with an asterisk, I visited all the libraries described, and I have to thank their librarians for their courtesy, and for the kind assistance which they gave me; and I also thank those other gentlemen to whom I wrote for information, for their letters, and for the reports, catalogues, &c. which they sent me.

I have endeavoured from the information thus obtained to give a short account of the various libraries, not so much page viii with a view to comparing them as to place on record their position and value, at a time when intense interest in all the colonies, and their institutions, is being shown by the mother country. I trust that the addition, by way of an appendix, of the Acts of Parliament relating to Public Libraries in New Zealand, may be useful to librarians in that colony, and interesting to those who have a taste for library matters.

I had at one time intended to add a list of the newspaper press in New Zealand; but, as I find that Messrs. Gordon and Gotch have supplemented their invaluable Australian Directory by a Dictionary of the Australasian Press, and that Sell's Dictionary of the World's Press, and the Year Book of New Zealand, both contain lists of the chief newspapers, I have contented myself with recording the names of the daily journals of those towns whose libraries I have described.

Some unexpected work, since my return to England, has occasioned the delay in the appearance of these pages. I trust, however, that they will not on that account have lost all interest for my New Zealand friends, whose forbearance I ask for this and any other shortcomings.

I should mention that my account of the Auckland Free Public Library, formed the subject of a paper read before the Library Association, in April, 1886.