Wednesday, 2 March 2016

The Alexander Turnbull Library

The National Library website, http://natlib.govt.nz/ has a very good thorough description of the ATL, so I will let them introduce you to it here:

The Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL) is a ‘library within a library’. Established in 1920 after Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull gifted his collection to the nation in 1918, “as the nucleus of a New Zealand National Collection”, its collections are now housed within the National Library building in Wellington.

The Turnbull Library collections are based on Turnbull’s personal library of books, manuscripts, photographs, paintings and sketches. Over time the collections have grown many times over through donation, bequest, legal deposit, and targeted purchasing to contain millions of items, including digitally-born material, sound recordings and oral histories.

The purpose of the Turnbull Library is:


  • to preserve, protect, develop and make accessible for all the people of NZ the collections of that library in perpetuity and in a manner consistent with their status as documentary heritage and taonga; and
  • to develop research collections and the services of the ATL particularly in the fields of New Zealand and Pacific studies and rare books; and
  • to develop and maintain a comprehensive collection of documents relating to New Zealand and the people of NZ.


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