Frank Zappa once said, "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to a library." Coming here reminds me of a time when I had the two horribly confused. Like many students who didn't know what they were doing, I'd wander in here on a cold winter's day to hang out with friends and pretend to study. I didn't actually work. Accessing the books in this library didn't seem as important as writing books of my own to put on these shelves.

Eventually I saw the error of my ways, and I'm very pleased to be here tonight in the wonderful Barr Smith Library, to celebrate its magnificence and speak in support of this Appeal to make it even more glorious.

As a writer, all libraries obviously have a place close to my heart, and not just because my books may be in them. Libraries are unique places, bordering the real and the mythic. They could spring either way, so swollen are they with imagination and speculation. From the Bodleian at Oxford, the NY Public and the Vatican, it's only a short hop to the Great Library of Alexandria, and from there to Jorge Luis Borges's "The Library of Babel" or the Library of the Clayr in Garth Nix's Lirael.

Libraries feature prominently in works of speculative fiction, by virtue of that proximity to the fantastic. They are part of our imagination as well as being repositories for our imagination. The idea of hidden or arcane knowledge, of secrets long lost and histories known only to a few, runs parallel to our outward urge, to explore and understand. Anyone who has seen The Fellowship of the Ring will remember the scene in which Gandalf searches through bundles of musty old records for mentions of the One Ring. Who didn't want to be down there with him? The wonder of learning is a key part of being human, and speculative fiction feeds on that wonder.

I've done it myself, with the Haunted City's Library of the Novitiate in The Storm Weaver and the Sand. I even set a story right here once, as a kind of tribute to the hours I'd wasted--although thanks to my lack of experience in that area, I had to research how my character would do her research. The irony wasn't lost on me.

Librarians sometimes take centre stage too. In Sean McMullen's future vision of Australia, librarians are the last bastions of civilisation in a devastated land. They wield real political power and are kick-arse warriors to boot. Who said sci-fi wasn't about wish-fulfilment?

Without libraries, and easy access to them, we wouldn't have the wealth of literature contained in grand institutions such as this one. I'm not just talking about the survival of texts written in the past; I mean that libraries directly inspire new books, generating new ideas in the minds of their readers every day. Research is the mother of inspiration, and thorough research lays the foundation for a great novel. Libraries are an integral part of the dialogue between authors, readers, critics and academics that makes literature such a vibrant and vital endeavour.

Libraries generating ideas for more books to put into them makes them sound like strange self-propagating machines, intent on consuming vast tracts of native forests and covering the face of the earth. In fact, it makes them sound like people. We are infovores, devouring all the information we can get our hands on and producing yet more information as a kind of by-product. The more there are of us, and the more effectively we can communicate, the more ideas we generate--be it about gardening, science, haiku, or new role-playing games involving wizards and monsters. Libraries play a crucial role in this process. They grow with us, and when they die--like Alexandria--we die a little too.

Libraries are repositories of culture, as well as knowledge. To deny someone access to a library is to apply a tourniquet to one of society's richest veins. Antarctic research bases have libraries. So do prisons. When we send astronauts to Mars, you can bet that they'll have some sort of library on-board, although I doubt it will look anything like...this.

What they will look like is hard to tell. Even I, an occasional futurist, would hesitate to outline the vaguest possibilities, although you can see the world edging closer to a genuine contender. Many texts are already available on the World Wide Web. Electronic books containing a significant percentage of the written output of our entire civilization have been promised for years. Access to such a wealth of knowledge for everyone on the planet, at any time, may still be a pipe dream, but it's an important aspiration--and one the Barr Smith Library is committed to, as we will shortly see.

One thing we can be certain of is that regardless of how all this information is delivered, the content has to come from somewhere. It has to be sorted and collated. It has to be regulated and vetted. It has to be accommodated in a central location and must be accessible to users, who could come from anywhere, with unique requirements and all manner of strange requests.

This is what libraries were made for. This is what they do.

Knowledge is the future, and we must care for it. We must not be afraid of the technology that spreads the concept of libraries to all corners of the world. We should in fact embrace it. As formats change and skills are lost, libraries must be there to preserve information that might otherwise slip through the cracks. It doesn't matter if a library is a magnificent building such as this one, or a device small enough to fit into our pocket. The idea of the library will remain forever.

Libraries ensure our past, enliven the present, and will enrich times to come. They deserve our support, and the Barr Smith Library is no exception. Please, dig deep. The future depends on it.