"It goes nicely with my Spanish knighthood," Colin Steele said upon being congratulated on his Member of the Order of Australia this week.
It was in 1984 that Mr Steele received the Knight Cross Queen Isabella La Catholica - alongside the likes of Al Grassby, the immigration minister for the Whitlam government - as recognition for his services to Hispanic culture.
This latest Australia Day honour - which was announced on Thursday evening - was for his significant service to librarianship and digital information sharing.
Moving to Canberra from the United Kingdom in 1976 - where he was an assistant librarian at Oxford University's Bodleian Library - Mr Steele spent the majority of his career at the Australian National University library, playing a pivotal role in the move towards digital information sharing in the 1990s.
But the Australia Day honour, Mr Steele said, was just as much recognition for the library field as it was for the work that he has done for it.
"What is fabulous is that it's a recognition of what I've done, but also what all my professional colleagues have done in the field of libraries and digital information, and book collecting and the importance of the book," he said.
"It's a recognition of them, my wife, in particular - because, as ever, I would never do any of this without support intellectually and, as my wife said, providing the necessary infrastructure."
Having spent decades in the industry - which included seeing many an author come to Canberra in his continuing role as convenor for The Canberra Times/ANU Meet the Author Series - Mr Steele has seen how the industry has changed. And indeed, been part of that change.
"We were obviously in a print environment for many years. but we were the first university library to have a website in the country. We were the first ones to set up a digital repository. And we were the first to set up an electronic press," Mr Steele said.
"And so in the 1990s, it was ironic that we were pushing all the digital stuff ... and we were being attacked by some of the elderly academics for not liking the printed book, even though we just got our 2 millionth book."
That was in 2020 - and the 2 millionth book was Flora Australasica, by Robert Sweet, a rare first edition of one of the most attractive Australian botanical books.
But how does Steele see the state of the library field today?
More than ever it's a balancing act - one that Steele says has swung too much in favour of the digital world.
"Now, ironically, I am now supporting the printed book because I feel the digital ones have gone too far," he said.
"The British Library was hacked in late October last year by a Russian ransomware group, and destroyed the entire digital infrastructure and it is still out of action. So people can't get access to stuff, and the public lending rights for the authors don't work. It's going to cost them £7 million in terms of restoration of IT.
"The library world has changed in the sense that a lot of people say, 'OK, the printed book doesn't exist anymore, you shouldn't use it'. But we say, well actually printed material is still needed.
"Your reliance on digital stuff is very important, because putting archives up on the web means we can get stuff in Europe or anywhere in the world and the ANU press sends this stuff out to the world as well. But on the other hand, you've got to have a printed backup, otherwise, you're going to be in trouble."
