Our main site and most of our physical collection are located in Avalon, Lower Hutt, in a quirky building which used to house a film studio. We have a second Lower Hutt site in Gracefield, which has a small physical collection tailored to the main research areas of the science staff based there.

We also have a site in Wairakei, near Taupō, with a physical collection predominantly covering geothermal, volcanology, and groundwater research (currently in off-site storage), and offices in Dunedin and Auckland.

Our team is a bit different from some special libraries in its makeup. There are four library staff: a team leader, two research support librarians in Avalon, and a part-time reference librarian in Wairakei. We also have three document specialists on our team who are responsible for formatting documents that will be published or sent to clients.

Another of our functions is publications for sale/outreach, with a part-time staff member selling material published by the current organisation and its predecessors. This database also has a lot of free material, including reports, maps, and posters. We are part of a wider information management (IM) team, which includes an information manager, information and records advisor, data management partner, and two fixed-term team members working on current IM projects. This team is part of the Digital, Systems and Information department.

GNS has a long history. We follow various predecessor organisations, beginning with the New Zealand Geological Survey, which was established in 1865. This heritage means that as librarians at GNS, we are the custodians of some books and other items which are over 150 years old. As the organisation is geological, this legacy material does get used from time to time.

Of course, in the modern day, most of our services are digital. We support the science staff in their research and with publication. We manage journal subscriptions, ensuring they can access the journals which are most valuable to their research. When we don’t own or subscribe to a book or journal a scientist wants, we fill requests by interloaning or purchasing the material.

We also offer literature searches and guidance for using both internal and external databases. Staff who are publishing work can get support with assessing the impact of publishing in particular journals, meeting style requirements, and managing references.

Our library catalogue is on Liberty, and we maintain an internal Bibliographic Database which contains published and unpublished science output. Unfortunately, we do not have a discovery layer tool for searching across all our available content. Materials indexed in the Bibliographic Database include maps, theses, client reports and other reports, and unpublished material such as field notebooks and letters. It includes internal and external material and is continually being updated with indexing of new and legacy material.

While material is searchable on this database, it is not all digital. There has been a project aiming to digitise the output of GNS and its predecessors, published and unpublished, for several years. Progress is a bit slow, with a mixture of in-house and external digitisation. Still, we continue working on it to ensure that these materials are preserved and accessible for current and future researchers.

Another database we manage is our Visual Media Library (VML). There used to be a dedicated photo librarian who took photographs and managed the VML, but now this task is left to us as library staff. Photography advice is gone with the photo librarian, and fortunately, there are skilled photographers in other parts of GNS, but we are managing the database. Our images are regularly requested for external use. They have been used in various ways, including in PhD and master’s theses, museum exhibitions, and educational material, among other things.

After more than 30 years as a Crown Research Institute, as per the Government’s announcement earlier this year, GNS Science will soon be part of a new Public Research Organisation (PRO), along with NIWA. The other current institutes will also be reformed into PROs. We don’t know exactly what the shape of our new organisation will be, but we will continue supporting high-quality science with our library services.