Barbican Library and British Library Centre for Conservation 7-10-08

On our tour of Barbican Library, we saw the Children's, Music, and Lending libraries. Our tour guide for the Children's library was Children's Librarian Amanda Owens. She told us that they currently have a staff of 8 people: 1 full-time librarian, 1 full-time assistant, and 6 part-time assistants. They cater to children from birth to age 14. They have 24,000 items to loan, and use Dewey classification. Their items consist of books, Cd's, cassettes, and "Play-Aways," and are on loan for a limit of 3 weeks. The children's DVDs and VHS tapes are available for loan in the lending library section. Public schools visit weekly for story time, and the librarian visits schools that are unable to come to Barbican to continue outreach through classroom story time and singing. They limit loans to 40 books per class per semester, to keep circulation manageable.

They also encourage their patrons to vote for and review books for the Carnegie Award for children's books in the UK. They also schedule special programs on Saturdays, such as puppets, crafts, author visits, etc. to continue outreach in the community. They participate in the national "BookStart" program, which makes available to all children under the age of 5 living in the UK 3 packages of books to encourage literacy and library support. They also do special Summer Reading Sessions as community outreach.

We then toured the music library with Liz Wells, Music Librarian at Barbican. It is one of the largest public music libraries in London, mainly due to its location in the Barbican Centre. The collection began in 1980. Their customers are mainly residents of the Borough and students of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which is located next door to the library. They have 16.5 thousand Cd's in their collection, including: jazz, pop, blues, folk, film, musicals, country, world, and classical, which are all located in subject and alphabetical order. They purchase 60-70 Cd's per month, which means that they withdraw items that are not necessary for archival frequently, and have sales usually once or twice a year, which continue to financially support the library. They do charge for lending, £ .40 for Cd's and £2.75 for DVDs. They have a number of Online Resources available as well, including Naxos Music Library, Oxford Music Online, and their own song index of popular and classical songs in print anthologies. They have a number of Periodicals, circulating Books (in Dewey classification), Reference, Bound Periodicals, and a large collection of scores (in McColeom Reeves classification scheme). They also have listening stations with: 6 CD players, 1 tape deck, and 1 connected to a record player, and laptop connections. The Electric Piano (with headphones) located at the entry has proved a popular resource, since an appointment must be booked at least a day in advance and is limited to 1 hour.

The Lending library section has an exhibit area with a 2-year waiting list, 20 public computers, a membership desk, fiction section (in subject and author order) and non-fiction section (in Dewey classification). They are proud of their RFID technology, which allows for extremely easy self-check out.

For more information about the Barbican Library, go to: http://www.barbican.org.uk/visitor-information/barbican-library

We next visited the British Library again, for a tour of the Centre for Conservation. We got to see how books are cleaned, repaired, and re-bound. Ruth, one of the conservationists, first demonstrated how she used a smoke sponge to remove dirt from paper, then explained how she washed the paper, de-acidified it, and added an alkaline substance to preserve the paper. Then Doug, another conservationist, showed us how to repair tears and cracks in the paper by using a flour paste and rice paper. Finally Chris, another conservationist, showed us how to repair binding and replace boards and leather on cover. Ruth informed us that the process takes at least 44 hours to repair an item.

More information about the Centre for Conservation is available at: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/whatson/blcc/homepage.html