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Auckland is in the North Island of New Zealand and is the country's largest and most populous city with 1.5 million residents. A new Auckland Council was created on 1 November 2010 by the amalgamation of seven smaller councils - Auckland City, Franklin District, Manukau, North Shore, Papakura District, Rodney District and Waitakere, and the Auckland Regional Council. This council is the largest local government authority in Australasia, and its library service, with 55 libraries and 4 mobiles, is the largest in the southern hemisphere. That library service is providing leadership for the new city in its aspiration to become the world's most liveable city within 30 years. This has been fecilitated by the strong cooperation by the individual library services long before the amalgamation was proposed and implemented.
In 2002 a group of Auckland region library managers formed a consortium to develop a better library service for the areas they served. Looking back it feels that in a serendipitous, yet thoughtful, way they began the process of moving Auckland into a single city. Their actions also anticipated the creation of the largest public library network in the southern hemisphere.
Background
For the mid part of the 20th century Auckland was composed of a myriad of small towns, boroughs and cities squabbling amongst each other to protect their patches. This structure hindered the growth of the greater Auckland area. An amalgamation in 1989 created a new Auckland region made up of seven smallish cities and districts. However, there were still issues when the different authorities had conflicting interests, different approaches and protective instincts. The 2010 amalgamation into a single city region and Auckland Council heralded a new era.
In 2002 the library managers of the five largest Auckland local bodies, Auckland, Manukau, North Shore, Rodney and Waitakere, decided to implement a common library management system. The eLGAR (Libraries for a Greater Auckland Region) consortium was born. Papakura joined the consortium in early 2009, and Franklin migrated to the shared LMS software in August 2010. The managers did not mention the words regional library service at first - such talk was regarded as subversive, and not reflective of current local government thinking. Nevertheless, the members of eLGAR strategized carefully, garnered appropriate support from their councils...