The Barbican

The Barbican, in the City of London, proper, is the only public library we will visit on our adventure. It was quite impressive. Set up within the Barbican arts complex as somewhat of an afterthought, the Barbican library is the only public lending library that I have ever visited where no staff member even mentioned budget issues. In fact, the children’s librarian boasted of a quite adequate yearly budget to work with. That was a first.

The first part of the library that we visited was the children’s library. This children’s library employs 2 full time children’s librarians and utilizes six general library assistants that rotate in and out of the children’s library staff or who have responsibilities in maintaining the children’s library. They have 24,000 loan-able items altogether, with 15,000 actually out on the shelves and 8, 500 in storage where they can readily be retrieved (in the basement). This children’s library serves young persons from birth to the age of 14, where they literally move from the space of the children’s library out into the adult library—by way of book and shelf arrangement, this transition is made more comfortable.

Some re-arranging had recently been done in both the children’s library and the main adult library to make better use of the space and the lighting in the area, which does not seem to have been designed with readers in mind. The original shelving was replaced with shorter shelves that allowed more light into the room and brightened up the space in the children’s area; in the adult section, newly designed shelves guide the readers from section to section in a place that is not conducive to generally easily navigated and browsable collections.

The children’s librarian, Amanda, described several of their activities to bring people into the library. It was quite interesting that the library was so well funded and staffed to carry out these activities with such a small population of residents in the actual city—only about 9,000 people live there full time. Triple that many use the Barbican library, though, and they are mostly commuters from outside the area. So the activities, like their baby reading times, are generally well-attended, with 25-30 families for each of two sessions during the week. The children’s library also has a rotating schedule of visits from the local state-funded schools, where each class comes in once a week to pick out a set number of books, depending on the grade level and the teacher’s discretion. The children’s library at the Barbican is also responsible for distributing the free book packs that each child in the UK is entitled to between the ages of birth and five years old, as part of the Book Start program. We should have one of these in the US!

We then moved on to a tour of the music library with the music librarian, Liz Wells. Because the Barbican is an art center, the music and art libraries are the specialization there, with one of the two largest music libraries in London. They started building the collection in the 1980’s from scratch, so their strength is in Modern Publications. For instance, this library is home to over 16,500 CD’s, but very few vinyl records. These are organized by genre (like any good music store) then alphabetically by author—and the genres are intentionally kept broad. This music library is also home to over 15,000 scores.

One of the more interesting things about the approach taken by the staff of the Barbican lending library was to refer to the people who use the library as customers—not patrons, or clients, or users, for the most part. There seem to be none of the qualms with taking a business approach to the public who uses the library, and that is probably why the Barbican is doing fairly well at attracting their target demographic to their services. Regular surveys of library users, excellent library services, and the use of updated technology—like the RFID information that is stored in each book and which will, soon, be used to inventory the entire collection, as demonstrated by librarian Jonathan Gibbs—keeps the customers of the Barbican lending library coming back.