Mike4 wrote:ursaminortaur wrote:
For children in particular access via a library to large numbers of books helps improve literacy without burdening the family (particularly poorer families) with the costs of purchasing their own personal library of books (most of which the child would only read once).
£180m well spent in your opinion then?
(Is that just the building, or does it include (perhaps) a million books at say £10 each?)
I was answering your general point about libraries.
However this particular library is hardly your small town lending library it is more akin to the British Library in London being a major visitor destination and research facility housing a number of major collections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_BirminghamThe Library of Birmingham is a public library in Birmingham, England. It is situated on the west side of the city centre at Centenary Square, beside the Birmingham Rep (to which it connects, and with which it shares some facilities) and Baskerville House. Upon opening on 3 September 2013, it replaced Birmingham Central Library. The library, which is estimated to have cost £188.8 million,[1] is viewed by the Birmingham City Council as a flagship project for the city's redevelopment. It has been described as the largest public library in the United Kingdom,[3] the largest public cultural space in Europe,[4][5][6] and the largest regional library in Europe.[7] 2,414,860 visitors came to the library in 2014 making it the 10th most popular visitor attraction in the UK
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Reaction to the planned library was generally positive. Then-Poet Laureate Andrew Motion said that "These plans are properly ambitious to preserve the best traditional practice, while also opening the building to new ideas about what a library should be — the heart of the community, fulfilling all manner of social needs as well as scholarly, research-based and pleasurable ones." Philip Pullman said "The new Library of Birmingham sounds as if it will be lovely and should attract even more users than the present one with its impressive visitor total of 5,000 a day." Sir Alan Ayckbourn said "I wholeheartedly support the proposed exciting new plans to develop the new Birmingham library" and Irvine Welsh said "[It's] an audacious and compelling initiative which promises to redefine and modernise the entire notion of public library services, and in the process create the greatest public information resource in Europe ... Writers will love it, and so will readers."[18]
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The library has nationally and internationally significant collections, including the Boulton and Watt archives, the Bournville Village Trust Archive, the Charles Parker Archive,[33] the Parker collection of children's books,[34] the Wingate Bett transport ticket collection,[34] the Railway and Canal Historical Society Library; and the photographic archives of the Warwickshire photographic survey,[34] Sir Benjamin Stone,[35] John Blakemore[36] and Val Williams;[37] and starting in 2009, continuing through 2014, acquired that of Daniel Meadows.[38] The Daniel Meadows collection moved to the Bodleian Library in March 2018.[39]
The specialist Shakespeare Memorial Room was designed in 1882 by John Henry Chamberlain for the first Central Library.[40] When the old building was demolished in 1974 Chamberlain's room was dismantled and later fitted into the new concrete shell of the new library complex.[40] When the Library of Birmingham was built, it was again moved, to the top floor.[40] It houses Britain's most important Shakespeare collection, and one of the two most important Shakespeare collections in the world; the other being held by the Folger Shakespeare Library. The collection contains 43,000 books[26] including rare items such as a copy of the First Folio 1623; copies of the four earliest Folio editions;[26] over 70 editions of separate plays printed before 1709 including three "Pavier" quartos published in 1619 but falsely dated. There are significant collections from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, a near complete collection of Collected Works, significant numbers of adaptations, anthologies and individual editions.
The Boulton and Watt Collection is the archive of the steam engine partnership of Matthew Boulton and James Watt, dating from its formation in 1774 until the firm's closure in the 1890s. The archive comprises about 550 volumes of letters, books, order books and account books, approximately 29,000 engine drawings and upwards of 20,000 letters received from customers. Boulton and Watt manufactured the screw engines for Brunel's SS Great Eastern and the archive includes a portfolio of 13 albumen prints by Robert Howlett documenting the construction of the Great Eastern, including a rare variant of the Brunel portrait of 1857.[41]
Also displayed in the Library are two large coade stone medallions, made in the 1770s and removed from the front of the city's Theatre Royal when it was demolished in 1956. These depict David Garrick and William Shakespeare.
