February Visit to the Library of Birmingham

Exeter Central Library has been under £4.5 million redevelopment for 1 1/2 years and reopens on 22nd May. The new Exeter Library will have a Business and Intellectual Property Centre for the first time. Therefore a visit to the new Library of Birmingham was arranged to see what had been achieved (with a slightly larger budget of more than £180 million), what difficulties they had and to find out about their Business and IP Centre.

The Business & Learning Manager gave a very informative 2 1/2 hour tour of the 11 floors of the Library and a good insight into the thinking behind each area. Having seen many images of the library I had this picture in my mind of a cube covered in metal rings and hadn't realised this iconic building was actually in 3 tiers. This had been planned to allow for 2 gardens, the Secret garden on floor 7 and the Discovery Terrace on floor 3. I thought that the outdoor space to read, relax with friends and enjoy the views was very relevant to the new Exeter Library where a new entrance to the rear of the building has been made to allow access to the park with outdoor seating planned. The Shakespeare Memorial Room, Skyline Viewpoint and Book Rotunda were amazing. I can’t wait to see the new book sculpture designed for the main foyer of the new Exeter Library.

The popularity of the new library was a very good expression of interest in the library but also caused some difficulties. The first month after opening on 3rd September staff spent all their time on crowd control and it wasn't until November they really started to get business and IP activities going. This demonstrated to me the need to have everything not only in place for the opening of the new Exeter Library but also to have organised the next few months after opening. An example of this is the free tickets for Library Camp SW 2014 in July being released for sale in February https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/library-camp-sw-2014-tickets-10431961277 .

The Business Co-ordinator then gave an instructive session about the Business & Learning databases the library subscribes to, the uses of the different databases and their popularity. 

I took lots of photographs of the interesting and the amazing and the more mundane notices, signs, leaflets etc.  http://www.flickr.com/photos/soolibabc/sets/72157640653172654 .