One development has inspired little comment. On 8 October 2005 Susan Wyndham, a senior writer at the Herald, reported that ‘the Fairfax library used by generations of Herald journalists is disappearing. Trolley-loads of books have been marched out of the building to be stored in the archives or sent to book heaven. Apart from a small research library, we now rely on the internet and loans from other libraries, and our librarians have been reinvented as researchers attached to news desks.’

The Herald library emerged in the 1910s, when Fanny Austin began compiling a card index to the newspaper. The Viennese-born Hans Forst was appointed librarian in 1946. As Gavin Souter writes in Company of Heralds (1981), under Dr Forst’s direction for the next thirty years, the library grew into one of the finest newspaper libraries in the world. Forst and his staff worked not only on indexing the Herald but on establishing vertical clippings files. A book library was maintained in a partitioned area on the editorial floor, and operated as a lending library for journalists. Forst insisted that review copies of books be handed over. In the late 1990s the library was finally given a book vote, enabling a systematic collection development policy.

It is not the first newspaper library in Australia to store materials off-site. News Ltd, the Herald & Weekly Times and Age libraries in Adelaide and Melbourne store a considerable proportion of their files and photographs off-site. Fairfax may well be the first newspaper library in Australia to send a substantial proportion of its books off-site; then again, its book collection is larger than those of most comparable libraries. A key driver behind these moves is real estate. It is cheaper to store material in repositories in industrial areas than in newspaper offices in the CBD.

So how does the new system at Fairfax work? A small number of books, some of them deposited in Forst’s era and rarely used, have been weeded out. Around half of the books in the research library have been sent to Alexandria, where the company’s priceless archives are also located.

The nine or ten librarians have been moved onto the editorial floors, with a certain number assigned to each masthead. In recent years, The Age also relocated two information services staff to the editorial floor. A similar system has been in place at some American and English newspaper offices for many years, although some of these operations are possibly better resourced. When one Sydney journalist visited the Washington Post in the 1970s, he noticed a researcher popping over to the National Archives to answer a query for a journalist.

Most agree that the Fairfax restructure has made librarians more visible and seem more accessible. Librarians now attend morning editorial conferences, and journalists who had been less familiar with the library are more inclined to ring or approach a librarian. The volume, duration and complexity of enquiries have increased, although they are yet to be matched by a commensurate increase in librarians’ numbers. One senior journalist now makes a point of asking where he is in the queue, and worries that librarians have been forced to abandon the rhythm of their work practices in the library and operate in the bustle of the newsroom. Some experienced journalists resent having so much material stored off-site.

Some of Fairfax’s best writers miss being able to easily browse through the library’s books and clippings. They worry that the new system, although more visible and more secure, might act as a disincentive to serious journalistic research and intellectual enquiry. If the answer to a query can’t be found via the Herald’s electronic database of post-1980s clippings or an online service, and a book or file that addresses the area isn’t readily at hand, the journalist might go no further. Serendipity – that great ally of the researcher, whether journalist or librarian – is an ever more elusive figure in this world of the Internet and the bottom line.