I’ve been reading for my entire professional life. As broadcaster, producer, journalist, author, curator and moderator, it’s what you do. But this is different.

For starters, I have to get dressed first. Until now, I’ve read mostly in bed, in the morning, my brain fresh and rested, instead of the way most people do: exhausted, at the end of the day, for barely 15 minutes before the book falls from their hand.

Now I have a reason to get up – as the inaugural reader-in-residence at the state library of New South Wales, that imposing set of buildings in Sydney facing on to both Macquarie Street and the Domain, via the Mitchell wing, whose massive doors feature remarkable scenes of Aboriginal life and deserve closer scrutiny. (I make a mental note to find out more about them from the Indigenous services team.)

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I’ve been given the keys (actually a swipe card that prompts a cheery tune) to a kingdom and invited to play, explore and discover. Access all areas. Well, almost. But first, I have to try not to get lost – the library is a veritable labyrinth, a maze of corridors beneath Macquarie Street. I am tempted to leave crumbs from the Fellows room, where I sit, so I can find my way back.

A quick first browse – guided by the encyclopedically knowledgable Maggie Patton, manager of research and discovery – yields instant, serendipitous treasure: the Robbins collection of stage magic. It comprises 900 books, catalogues and pamphlets full of trade secrets, intended exclusively for the eyes of professional illusionists and conjurers. The collection includes 15 years’ worth of issues of Abracadabra, (“the only magical weekly in the world”), manuals on hypnotism, tricks using doves and – I kid you not – one featuring “magic with livestock”. I select a book from the shelves only to discover it had been signed, with a flourish, by none other than Harry Houdini. Moments like these make my scalp tingle.

Randomly exploring the stack, as the miles of book shelving storage are known, I come across a 19th-century cookbook with endpapers that show exactly where on a formal dining table each dish should be placed, their positions as formally choreographed as those of the guests: roast pheasant at the head, then “crow fish in savery [sic] jelly”, “pickled smelts” and “stewed cardoons”, and in the centre, something called “transparent pudding covered with a silver web”, followed by “collard pig”.

There are surprising objects here too. “Oh that’s Patrick White’s nanny’s trunk,” says Patton offhandedly. With its barrel-shaped lid, it looks like the kind of thing you would expect a coachman in a TV adaptation of a Dickens novel to hoist on to a horse-drawn carriage for an orphan or governess.

“We also have hair,” says Patton, promising to show me locks and curls belonging to Henry Lawson, Eleanor Dark and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. For now I am still trying to absorb the vocabulary of this unfamiliar universe: square archive boxes for the storage of newspapers are known as “pizza boxes”; objects, as opposed to works on paper, are called “realia”.

In the bowels of the library’s conservation department, they make glue every Monday morning and forensically repair books that have been damaged by time, moisture and pests. Extractors keep the air as free of dust as possible. The silence is one of intense focus and concentration. Along the hallway, there is a massive machine from Switzerland called Gunnar, equipped with special software that makes archival boxes for precious items being loaned to other institutions. It sits in a room with a giant guillotine that slices card for mounts.

Upstairs is another secret world: the DX (short for digital experience) Lab, where brilliant innovators and visiting artists come up with cool interactive ways of seeing the library’s collection of artefacts. Meridian shows us how fragile 17th and 18th-century maps normally kept under lock and key would have looked to cartographers back then; the project brings them to life as gorgeous 3D globes, gently spinning on screen. Here too there are new words, as well as worlds, to discover: these precious items are made up of “gores” and “calottes” – technical terms for the materials from which the spheres were originally cut.

In the foyer near Cafe Trim (named after Matthew Flinders’ cat and not intended as a dietary recommendation) the DX team have installed a vending library (a play on the term “lending library”) that uses a Twitter bot to suggest a personalised item from the collection to users. Not surprisingly, children adore watching it dispense cards. This and other multisensory projects being developed by the DX Lab make my brain fizz with possibility.

And what am I doing here? Part catalyst, part ambassador, I am truffling through the archives, finding fresh ways to extract the marrow of the collection and share it with wider audiences via a blog, events and collaborations with the incredible team of curators here, who perhaps don’t always remember that they are the essential human component that makes this a mind-expanding hub for the whole city and the state.

For too many people, the library is just a bunch of archives. They may not realise that it is not just preserving the past and the present but creating the future. Last week I met a smart young lawyer who works just around the corner. She had plenty of curiosity and was a keen reader, but confessed that she had never set foot inside the building. Making her want to is my challenge.