Pardon me that this is a little personal.

I first visited the State Library of Victoria aged 12. I held books retrieved from its mountainous stacks with trembling hands. Its stupendous card catalogue blew my schoolboy mind. Search my name in the modern electronic counterpart today and it appears 125 times, mostly for works I researched there. My 84-year-old mother has been a volunteer library tour guide for more than a decade.

That doesn’t make me special, by the way. A helluva lot of Victorians feel strongly connected to the library, an institution in the very best of senses. Which is why we are aghast at the apparent enshittification of its core functions mooted by management’s ‘Strategic Reorganisation Change Proposal’, which would cut almost 40 jobs, and more than halve the number of reference librarians, whose numbers were halved as recently as 2019.

By the end of this crude self-lobotomy, it is envisaged that the

© The Guardian