Regina Everitt: Let's start with your experience of using academic libraries.

Neil Everitt: As a mature student at Birkbeck, University of London, I used the library spaces as the transition from work to study, to take time to breathe, to catch up, before evening lectures. This (precious) 45 minutes or so, three times a week, gave me the opportunity to have some ‘me time’, important to an introvert, and replenish my energy reserves before the evening lectures.

The library also created a connection with the University ‘space’. This may have been replaced by other spaces such as the Students’ Union if I had been studying full time perhaps – but the library was an important element of how I remember my Birkbeck experience. Another major element of that experience was the support provided to utilise the resources available through the library and aid my transition into academic study.

Later, studying at Cranfield University, the space in and around the library was used to collaborate as part of small study teams, as part of a larger cohort of students, designed to replicate the way teams operate in organisations. The study teams provided support to their members by dividing the workload, and working together on projects and case studies, and created natural competition between the study teams. The teams were given free rein to utilise the variety of spaces available at the University, but speed was needed to bag the most appropriate space for the task, to avoid five tired and over-caffeinated individuals huddling around a single laptop screen as a spreadsheet was analysed or last-minute tweaks to a presentation were agreed.

Dietterlin and other Renaissance artists supported an empirical approach to architectural image-making, one that emerged in treatises like Dietterlin’s Architectura. Such treatises became sites of conflict between rationalist and empirical mathematical traditions, with Dietterlin’s mixed arithmetic and geometrical design procedures marking a pivotal turn toward empiricism. The development of prints in architectural texts – from geometrical illustrations in masonic incunables to Dürer’s 1525 Lesson on Measurement and archaeological renderings by Sebastiano Serlio, Philibert De L’Orme, and Hans Blum – shows how Dietterlin and his contemporaries increasingly rejected received knowledge in favor of the empirical epistemology also practiced by period artists and natural philosophers. As architectural treatises shifted from rationalist to empirical approaches to architectural design, they aligned architecture with the empirical culture of Renaissance image-making exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura.

Introduction

My son visited his mates in their first year of university. Upon his return, I was keen to hear what they thought about the campus. Having been to the University for a meeting, I was aware that it had a large, modern library with fantastic courtyard views over lush gardens. Although one of my university libraries has a wonderful view overlooking the Royal Albert Docks in London, I confess to having a bit of garden envy.

‘Good weekend?’ I asked. ‘Yeah, good,’ he said in near-monosyllabic detail. ‘They have a great library,’ I said, foraging for a more textured response. He is used to excitement about libraries from me. He has what I hope are fond memories of whiling away the time in the children's section in the local public library, flipping through picture books.

‘Oh, I don't even think they know where that is,’ he laughed.

Well, it's there when they discover they need it, I thought to myself. Unsurprisingly, in the heady, early days of university life, the ‘perceived value’ of the university library may not be obvious to some students. However, as course demands set in (such as the need for learning resources, study spaces and research skills development), the library's value comes to the fore. Bain & Company Inc. identify 30 elements of value for customers, and group them on a pyramid in four categories: functional, emotional, life changing and social impact – like Maslow's hierarchy of needs (Almquist et al., 2016). The functional or lowest rung of the ladder covers basic needs.

When the authors contacted me about writing an afterword for this volume, I was immediately excited to use the opportunity to take another glimpse into the rock art world of Australia – an area I am only peripherally involved in nowadays. It has been a while since I spent time in Gunbalanya in western Arnhem Land. With Injalak Hill as a backdrop, and a billabong out the back door, my time there was pleasurable and full of wonderment at the abundance of rock art and the community that nurtured the art and that was, in turn, nurtured by the art. It’s been much too long since I was ‘on Country’ – June 2009 was my last visit ‘up top’ to see Kojan and other friends and mates. To my Jawoyn relatives in Barunga and Beswick I am bangardi.

Academic disciplines, and especially history and archaeology, presume that a particular kind and experience of time is normal and universal. Although deeply concerned with history, rock art confounds ‘settler-time’ and the temporalities assumed by academic disciplines. This chapter considers the ‘re-appearance’ of ever-present buffalos in west Arnhem art, as well as the ever-presence of seemingly ‘disappeared’ art to reveal how the knowledge on the rocks points to alternative ways of experiencing time.