My Books Are My Fortress

The Barbican Library is an atypical public library located in the City of London. The City of London should not be confused with Greater London, for it is only one square mile and it is the extent of what London was during the Roman and Mediaeval periods. The library was built in a region of London that was bombed extensively during WWII. All that survived was the church where Milton was buried and Shakespeare worshipped. When they decided to rebuild the area, they made it into a barbican, or fortified gateway. The area is built like a fortress and it can be a bit confusing to get into, which was the idea.

The Barbican is a lending library, and serves the population of the City of London as well as those who work in the square mile. It was built in the 1980s, but has been modernized over the course of the last thirty years. They are actually celebrating 30 years of the Barbican this year! There is a lot to impart about this library and I could go on for a long time, but I want to focus on what I believed was the best part of this library: its music library.

The Music Library is located on the ground floor of the Barbican Library, which is actually located in the larger Barbican Centre. It just recently won the Excellence Award, and excellent it is. We spoke with the Here are some fun facts about the music library: 

• It was the first music library in the City of London
• It has TWO practice pianos that patrons can use for an hour a day, as long as they reserve in advance. So cool!
• They have a collection of 9,000 books and nearly 16,000 scores.
• They also have a collection of 15,000 CDs, which is the largest in London and one of the largest in England

Overall, the Barbican Library offers some amazing services throughout their library. The librarians who gave us the tour, Geraldine Pote and Jonathan Gibbs, are determined to make the library as self-serving as possible. They use RFID to scan in and out books at self-service counters, and these RFID scanners are very high-tech and allow users to just place their books on the scanner and have them be read by the machine. They also have this for the CDs that patrons borrow from the library. They also have a great children’s library that offers tons of programs to the patrons of the library as well as children in the city of London. This is definitely a public library to strive towards.

Also, the children's librarian discussed this program that the UK has for all of it's children. It's called Bookstart and it gives every child born in the UK a book at birth, and then again at age three. There is something of this sort in the US but it's not a national program and we should definitely strive to do that. Here is the link if you would like to read more about it.