Recording continuing professional development (CPD) for Revalidation

Having just submitted my application for CILIP Revalidation (after Chartering in 2011), I figured now would be a good time to look at how I record my continuing professional development, and see if I could make any improvements. (Yes, a year ago may have been a better time, and being that I don't know whether or not I've successfully revalidated yet, perhaps I am doing this too late. Either way, hopefully it will help me with either a resubmission or a future Revalidation in a year or so's time).

Having recently read the CILIP Revalidation posts on the Joeyanne Libraryanne blog, I figured these would help to give me some inspiration about what I could improve, and how.

The first stage of revalidating is to record what professional development you have. My current submission includes things like attend conferences, participating in department and university-wide meetings, mentoring, professional reading, visiting libraries in other sectors and getting involved in staff management and recruitment. All of these are valid professional development activities, as are many others.

Jo suggests recording these on a daily, monthly and annual basis. This is where I fall down. I record my activities periodically, but not in any sort of organised manner. This makes it easy to miss activities, or forget what I have gained from them. So, in an attempt to get a little more organised, I have combined some of the advice on Jo's blog with some of the things I already do:

Weekly (every Friday)

I have set up, as suggested, an iDoneThis account. Whilst you can be e-mailed daily from this (you choose a question, then send an e-mail in reply, which gets added to your iDoneThis calendar), I have opted to just be e-mailed once a week, on a Friday afternoon. I only work 3 days a week, so getting a daily e-mail seemed a bit excessive. Whilst I might do development activities every working day some weeks, this is rare - and it's equally like that I won't have done any in my 3 working days during a week. I'm hoping that one e-mail on a Friday afternoon will prompt me to complete the calendar every week with any CPD I have done, but not feel overwhelming.

Monthly (last Friday of the month)

I am better at updating my CPD on something like a more monthly basis. I tend to go through my Outlook calendar, figure out what CPD I have done, and then add it to a Word document, detailing which of the three CILIP assessment criteria it meets. This helps me determine which activities to bother adding to the CILIP VLE as part of my development log. In future, I'm hoping to do something of a combination of what Joeyanne suggests on her blog, and the above. I will aim to:

1) Ensure that my iDoneThis calendar is up-to-date with all my development activities (whether or not I plan to add them to the CILIP VLE)
2) I may continue to add things to a Word document in order to determine which assessment criteria it meets. Not having used iDoneThis properly yet, I don't know whether or not I'll find this necessary. I may skip this step; the point is that I will use this time every month (if I don't end up doing it weekly) to determine which activities I want to add to the CILIP VLE.
3)  Add the relevant activities to my CPD log in the CILIP portfolio

Annually

Jo also suggests updating your development plan and profiles (such as your CV and publications page) on a monthly basis. I have to admit, I'm rather more ad-hoc about this. I haven't published much at all, and I tend to have something of an 'it looks good and is relevant to me right now, so I'll do it' approach to development planning. So, for me, the following are more annual activities:

January
1) Update my CV (to be fair, I do need to add a publications section to this) - every Jan
2) Update my development plan (this usually takes the form of a 1-year, 3-year and 5-year plan, and the broad activities I need to carry out to achieve this) - every Jan

September
3) Complete the PKSB (Professional Knowledge and Skills Base). I've actually only done this on an ad-hoc basis in the past, but the new PKSB is actually much easier to use than previous CILIP iterations, and I believe it could be helpful with future development planning
4) Submit Revalidation CPD log and supporting evaluation statement

It may seem odd to split these four activities into two separate sections (one at the beginning of the year, one in the middle), but I know how much time I have, and am fully aware that trying to get them all done at the same time just won't happen. Only having two activities to do at any one time gives me a fighting chance of actually achieving the above.

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The rest of Joeyanne's blogposts in her CILIP Revalidation Hints and Tips series focus on writing the supporting statement and compiling and submitting your Revalidation. I'm not going to focus on these in this blog post (primarily because I haven't successfully revalidated yet, and the advice Jo gives is perfectly good - I wouldn't have anything extra to add). However, they're great blog posts, and the one on compiling and submitting is especially helpful if you're trying to use the CILIP VLE and feeling a bit lost. I may well be coming back to it as a reference tool in a year or so.

So, the next thing to do is to set up reminders for myself in Outlook so that I know what I should be doing at any one point in time. I'll let you know how I get on!

PS Acronym explanation time:

CILIP: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals
CPD: Continuing Professional Development
VLE: Virtual Learning Environment

My blog list

You may have noticed that I've now updated this. The original blog list was created when I began this blog, as part of the 23 Things for Professional Development course. This meant, of course, that a number of the blogs on the blog roll (if not all of them) hadn't been updated for some time. Not that there was anything wrong with the posts on these blogs; I just thought that it was worth removing references to blogs that hadn't been updated in 3 years.

You may notice that the blog list is now somewhat shorter. I do read rather less blogs than I used to, but I hope the ones listed will be pretty informative if you do want to take a look. Most are connected with Open Access in some way or another, because that's the focus of my work, but there are a couple of more general library blogs. Of course, I'm open to suggestions if there is an amazing blog out there you think I should be reading!

Applying for a job: what to do, and what not to do

Firstly, apologies for the massive gap between this post and the last one. I don't have any real excuse except that, well, there's not been much to blog about until now. May mostly consisted of me being on holiday, and whilst June was much busier library-wise, I haven't really been able to talk about it until now.

This is becasue a large chunk of June was taken up with advertising, shortlisting, and interviewing for the post of Library Information Administrator for the Research Repository (known in other circles with less long-winded titles as "Repository Administrators").

Now, I have been involved in the interview process before. Indeed, when we last advertised for a Repository Administrator back in 2010, I designed and assessed the test for it (at UWE, interviews for posts at this grade tend to involve an interview and a test, once you get past the application stage). I've also sat on interview panels for posts in other areas of the university in the past. But this is the first time I've played a part in the entire process, right through from designing the application questions to being on the interview panel.

So, what can I tell you about the process that's helpful if you're thinking of applying for a job? Well, for starters we had over 50 applicants, so that's a lot of job application forms to get through. And we were lucky (or perhaps unlucky, depending upon your view) that almost none of those applications were joke ones. Almost everybody was serious, and had experience that they could apply to the post being advertised. So we really did have to consider 50+ applications. So, considering that, what were the common mistakes people made when applying?

• Simply repeating the job description/ person spec in their application. We wrote it, we know what it says. Good applicants used their understanding of the job and their skills to explain why they would be good at the job, and why they wanted the job.
• Only giving one word-answers in order to demonstrate skills and assuming this meant we knew what they were talking about. If we ask for experience learning a new piece of software, "SPSS" doesn't tell us anything. Except that you can't write in sentences.
• Conversely, giving us one-page answers to demonstrate every skill on the person specification. You don't need to do a brain-dump of everything you've ever learnt - with this many applications, we haven't got time to read it and pick out the salient points. Focus in on the particular skill you want to promote, give us a short one or two-paragraph answer with examples, and demonstrate how you have acquired that skill.
• Using a load of acronyms and then failing to explain what they mean. The library world especially is terrible for acronyms, and whilst most of us might understand the obvious ones (OA, CPD, VLE etc) don't assume this is the case. I know I'm guilty of it, but if I'm applying for a job outside of UWE (or even within it) I won't assume everybody knows what RBI stands for.
• Not being concise when telling us about their current post. It's great to know approximately what somebody currently does, especially if it's relevant, but we don't need a full job description. Anything particularly relevant should be referred to when you promote your specific skills to us.
• Now, this may be UWE-specific, but the UWE application form asks you a number of questions relevant to the person spec that you need to respond to. It then has a section where you can supply additional information. There's nothing wrong with using the additional info box, but don't need to repeat what you've already said. Good things to include in here are things like why you want the job and what you understand about the job and its context. A couple of short paragraphs should suffice.
• Supplying unnecessary CVs. Don't supply your CV unless it is a requirement, or you honestly believe there are a number of things on your CV that you haven't been able to include anywhere on the application form. The UWE application form is pretty extensive as it is, and not once did I then read a CV that changed my mind one way or the other. It's not wrong to include a CV, but it's extra work for the shortlisters that they don't really need.

So, you've taken all that advice on board and been offered an interview. Giving advice on what to do during interviews is harder - mostly because, generally, the people who make it to this stage have done a pretty good job and therefore make fewer obvious mistakes. A couple of points worth thinking about though:

• Know a bit of background about the job and the organisation/ company. I guarantee you at least one other candidate will have done some research, so if you know nothing, it'll become obvious pretty quickly.
• Don't assume you're in with a good chance just because you have experience (either by doing a similar role before, or because you're an internal candidate). Everybody we interviewed had experience. The stand-out applicants were the ones that had experience, enthusiasm, and up-to-date knowledge not just of the job, but also of the area surrounding the job (in this case, open access more generally).
• If you have already answered a question and don't really have anything else to say, keep your mouth shut. This one comes from personal experience when attending interviews as well as being on interview panels. Good interviewers will leave a pause, so if you do think of something worth saying, you'll have time to do so. If you don't think of anything additional, then a brief, concise answer is better than a general ramble with no end-point in sight. Equally, if you haven't gotten anywhere close to the question the interviewer is trying to ask (and remember, they're human too - they can word questions incorrectly or incomprehensibly sometimes), they will do their best to rephrase the question to help you. With a good interviewer, you might not even realise it's meant to be the same question.

One final point that might help with the nerves (and this doesn't come from previous interviewing experience, but from some wise words my mum told me a long time ago): remember, you're judging them as much as they're judging you. You might find the job doesn't sound like what you thought it was going to be, or you don't like the atmosphere, or the attitude of the people you're going to be working with. It might just not feel 'right'. And that's fine; far better for everybody that you find out now than a month into the job. You'll probably find that if you do feel this way you won't get offered the job anyway - it's happened to me in the past and, looking back, I'm incredibly grateful that it did.

Now hopefully that'll advice will help both you and me out if/ when you or I apply for jobs in the future. If I take it on board, apply for jobs and don't get them, I'll let you know so you can ignore the advice above!

State of Play - Open Access: Extending the access to the research literature

Considering I attended this conference at the end of February, this blog post has been a little late in coming. But my recent attendance at the 37th annual UKSG conference, and subsequent blog posts about its content and the ease of networking at it, has reminded me that it’s not the only conference I’ve attended in recent months!

As with the UKSG conference, I wrote a blog post about this conference on open access for our library staff development blog. Whilst what appears below is, for the most part, what appeared there, I have included some perhaps somewhat contentious thoughts that are very much my own personal opinions. Whilst I could have stated these on our staff blog, I didn’t want to take the focus away from the content being discussed. Here, on my own blog, I’m happy for people to take away whatever they will from my own views!

Conference Report

A researcher writes their research. It is then sent off to an independent reviewer (such as a Learned Society) for peer review, before being published by the researcher’s university, which runs a campus-based publishing house.

Is this a nightmare scenario, a pipe dream, or the future as you see it? At the conference I attended entitled “State of Play – Open Access: Extending Access to the Research Literature” it was the ideal scenario that experts in Open Access came up with when asked “How would you ideally structure open access?”

The conference was excellent and fast-paced, with a lot of ideas and strong opinions on the topic of open access. Below I will talk about some of the main themes that captured my interest.
Gold Open Access

This is where the author (or more normally, the funder or university) pays for a piece of research, usually a journal article, to be made freely available to read on the publisher’s website. In contrast to this, green open access is when a version of a piece of research is made freely available online, usually via an institutional repository (such as the UWE Research Repository).

The Head of Science Information at the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) explained that the Research Council UK (RCUK’s) preference was for gold open access rather than green open access. This is because it gives immediate unrestricted access, and is then accessible to the widest audience possible. Articles on institutional repositories often have embargoes, and aren’t the final published versions. Whilst they are usually a good representative of the final version, I can see the argument against a system that provides delayed access to research.

In addition to this, green open access is helping to prop up an already broken subscription model. A number of speakers pointed out that whatever system we have in place, the business model for it needs to be sustainable. Whilst the green open access business model props up the current subscription model, the gold open access business model is scalable and therefore sustainable in the long run.

Not everybody agreed that gold open access was the way forward (although there was some discussion about how green and gold open access should not be mutually exclusive), but the speakers really got me thinking about, and have nearly managed to convince me, that gold open access is the best option.

This does lead on to some interesting scenarios though. If we do successfully implement a fully gold open access culture, there should no longer be any need for repositories or (dare I say it) Repository Managers. So I would be out of a job – as would a lot of other library staff who currently administer library subscriptions. However, I believe that a number of other jobs would spring up to replace them – there still needs to be an infrastructure in place to manage gold open access and article processing charges (APCS – see below), and I strongly believe this is a role librarians can take on. So perhaps it’s a case of different roles, rather than lost jobs.

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

In order to achieve full gold open access, universities have begun to pay publishers article processing charges, or APCs. If the research is RCUK funded, RCUK will often pay these APCs (via the university). However, speakers at the conference were mindful of how these charges worked, and more than once they warned against allowing big subscription deals to morph into the Big APC Deals. There was a suggestion that, instead of paying APCs per piece of research, we should be paying for each of the specific services that publishers carry out, such as peer review, separately.

The other difficulty with APCs is the complexity of the decision making steps that authors have to go through each time when applying for funding. The decisions they have to make at this stage (such as which Creative Commons licence to choose, what type of copyright agreement to sign) are different to decisions they have had to make in the past. Whilst library staff can help with this, if the infrastructure isn’t in place to enable this to happen, it could get very confusing for the author.

Open Access Infrastructure

Over the past ten years or so, an infrastructure has grown to support open access. This includes services such as SHERPA ROMEO (which provides information on publisher copyright policies), SHERPA FACT (which links together funder and publisher policies), and DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals). All these services were originally set up as projects and are still being run on project money. This means that none of these services have robust sustainability plans, but are incredibly well used in the open access community. We therefore need to find a way to assess and select the critical services we need to support open access, and then determine how we will sustain this infrastructure.


The above topics weren’t the only ones discussed. Other areas of debate included Creative Commons Licenses, the current peer review system, and how other universities run their institutional repositories. I came back from the conference with a number of questions and ideas: “Why don’t we keep those stats? Why have we never tried to run a webinar? Do I really have a preference for gold or green open access?” Overall, an incredibly thought-provoking conference which has given me lots of good ideas to take forward. Not to mention lots of potentially unanswerable questions.

UKSG conference blog post report

As promised, here's a follow-up to my post on conferences and networking, talking about the content of the UKSG conference in more detail. I wrote the majority of this text for our staff development blog, but I think (hope?) it has wider appeal!

Last week I attended the UKSG conference in Harrogate as a first timer. UKSG is a three-day long conference looking at all things serials-related. In recent years this has meant a focus on research support and open access, which is why I was in attendance. As you can imagine with an intensive 3-day conference, there is a lot of information to take on board. I’ve tried to pull out some of the things that struck me as main themes at the conference, especially ones that my team and I have a specific interest in (many of these themes are therefore quite research support focused).

•     The changing role of libraries

It was widely recognised that the job of libraries is changing, and the work they do now will not be the same as the work they do in ten years’ time. Stockholm University gave a good example of this. Whilst they still aim to ensure that individuals have access to what they need, they now also aim to make sure that the work done by individuals at the university is available to the rest of the world. It’s important to Stockholm to ensure that the information flows in both directions.

Both Stockholm University and Utrecht University Libraries were also very clear that they don’t try to bring users to the library/ website – they simply want to provide them with the tools to access the info they need. Whilst Stockholm stated that their EBSCO Delivery Service is just one tool among many, Utrecht have gone one step further and taken away their library catalogue completely. Their users use Google and Google Scholar, so this is what they’ll support. However, a warning came from the audience here: Google is a commercial service. It can be removed at any time. Bill Thompson from the BBC stated that it would be best to support open-source initiatives, which have a community behind them, instead of a corporation, as these services can’t just be removed. But can we really dictate what services our users should use in this way?

•      The purpose of scholarly communication

For me, Michael Jubb’s breakout session on the future of scholarly communications was a great reminder of the reasons why scholarly communication exists, and what it is trying to achieve. He stated that whilst how we go about communicating this information has changed, what we’re fundamentally trying to achieve hasn’t.

The four original (and still relevant today) purposes of scholarly communication were to register research findings, review and clarifying findings before publication (still achieved through peer review), disseminate new knowledge and preserve a record of those findings. The Royal Society states that research today should be accessible, intelligible, assessable and usable.

•     How we communicate research

However, what has changed is how we communicate research. For some researchers though, it hasn’t changed enough. In many ways research papers were felt to be archaic. David de Roure, an academic at Oxford University, felt that it is not just the article that is the outcome of the research; it is also the collection of social research objects we exchange. The research is the group of objects that we have a social discourse around.

Ernesto Priego took this one step further by suggesting that publishing is where content goes to die. Perhaps proving his point, his slide stating this went viral on social media almost instantly. If he’d published this point in a journal article, would anybody have noticed? Ernesto felt that research should be the beginning, not the end, of a conversation. Instead of being encouraged to publish against one another, researchers should be encouraged to read, and to talk, to each other. The aim should be for collaboration, not competition, and a culture of sharing should be developed.

•     The importance of re-usability, not just open access

Whilst there is still a lot of debate around open access and how far we should take it, there are a group of people who believe open access to research papers alone just isn’t good enough. Whilst they acknowledge that openness brings risks and an inherent lack of control, they believe that things are no use if they can be found but aren’t reusable. Bill Thompson (from the BBC) went so far as to state that open data should be used, reused and distributed by anyone for any purpose. PDFs are an issue here, because they are difficult to use for re-use.

Even HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) recognise the importance of re-usability. Whilst not mandatory for the post-2014 REF (Research Excellence Framework), HEFCE have stated that they will give credit to institutions that enable re-use rights and text mining on the research they produce.

•     New challenges in open access

It was recognised that open access is providing us with a number of new challenges. Some of the newest challenges mentioned were around research data and open access monographs.

The sheer size and volume of datasets (sometimes as many as 6 million data points) in the digital age

Enjoying the sunshine in a Harrogate park during a lunch break

means that you can no longer simply include all the evidence/ data you need to reproduce research in a research paper. There are also massive challenges in making this amount of data open and accessible. In addition to this, there is still a culture of people wanting to hold on to their data            

In contrast to this, almost everybody in attendance seemed to be in agreement that monographs should be made open access. But, again for the post-2014 REF, HEFCE stated that whilst monographs should be OA, the business models are too immature, and the lead times for publishing monographs are also very long – it’s already too late for the next REF. However, credit will be given to institutions that do make monographs openly available. There are already projects looking at this very issue. One example is Knowledge Unlatched, a project which is getting libraries to share the costs of making books open access. The library pays a title fee with a fixed cost, and books are then made open access with a Creative Commons licence.

As well as all of the above, there were a number of breakout sessions around article processing charges (APCs), the HEFCE Open Access policy, research data management and bibliometrics (and other things!) that left me full of ideas, questions and studies that I can take back and use in my day-to-day work. I found UKSG to be an incredibly useful, if rather intense, conference.

Conferences and networking

Last week, I attended my first UKSG conference in Harrogate. Ill blog about the content of the conference once I've pulled together my mass of notes into something cohesive. For now, I just want to reflect on one specific aspect of the conference - the networking.

Firstly, I'll admit that I was pretty nervous about attending. I did want to go to UKSG as a lot of the content looked very relevant to what I do, but it's the first time I've been to a 3-day long conference, and I know how awful 1-day conferences can be when you fail to find anybody to talk to all day. So how was I going to cope for 3 days?

Now, it turned out that I did have a couple of things to help me along. One of my colleagues was also attending the conference, so at least I would have somebody familiar to check in with. A couple of days before I left, an ex-colleague,who now works in a similar area to me, also got in touch to say that he would be attending.

In the end, the networking aspect of the conference was one of the easiest, and most enjoyable, parts. A number of other Repository Managers and people working in the area of research support were at the conference - and many of them I knew from previous conferences (some of them I hadn't seen for years, and it was great to catch up with them). Now I know networking is about meeting new people as well as old colleagues and acquaintances, but when you've met enough of the latter, it gives you the confidence to talk to the former.

By day 3 my problem wasn't finding people to talk to, it was having the energy to talk to them and still be able to sit through all the breakout sessions and talks I was interested in. I came away from UKSG feeling energised, both from the content and the large amount of people I'd talked to, but also utterly exhausted. I was very grateful for the 4 day weekend that closely followed the conference!

The Library of Birmingham

Whilst visiting a friend in Birmingham, I took the opportunity to look around the new Library of Birmingham. It’s been heavily promoted in the press, and has been being built for the past 5 years (I’ve certainly visited friends in Birmingham on more than one occasion when the building has been in progress).

Now, usually when I visit a library I do it in my capacity as a librarian (unless it’s my small local public library which, yes, I do use to borrow books for myself and my son). But this particular weekend I had my son, my friend and her daughter with me, and I was keen to look around the library from the eyes of a customer, not a librarian. Obviously you can’t stop thinking like a librarian, but your perspective is very different when you have a demanding 2 and 3 year old in tow!

I have to say, my overall impressions (both as a librarian and a customer) were very positive. I don’t use large public libraries that often, but, considering the sheer scale of the Library of Birmingham, it didn’t feel particularly intimidating. Instead, it felt like a social space that you wanted to be in. We visited on a Saturday afternoon, and the number of visitors certainly gave the impression that there were plenty of people who were happy to be there. Not everybody was using the library as a “traditional” library – there were clearly plenty of people visiting, like me, just to see what the place was like. But these people were still choosing to visit, and engage with, the library as a place to be. I don’t see that as a bad thing.

Another great thing about the library was that it wasn’t afraid to use signage. It didn’t feel cluttered, but in a building this big you need to know where things are. It took less than a couple of minutes to figure out how to get to the children’s section – although I have to say that the lifts seem small and limited for the buildings capacity. Now I’m all for using the stairs, but we had a buggy with us (to be fair, if more people were good at using the stairs those with buggies and wheelchairs would have been having less problems).

So, what about the children’s section? This was, after all, why we were here (well, that and I wanted to see the place). It’s incredibly well designed, and there’s plenty to keep kids entertained – and plenty of books too. When I visit a library with my son, I want two things:

1. Enough books to find something he’ll enjoy that we haven’t read before
2. Enough space and distractions so that if it’s a rainy day, or my son needs some playtime, he can get it. Extra books, interesting chairs and objects, and stairs designed for kids (all of which Birmingham Library has) are the kind of things that help achieve that. I don’t want to feel that we need to get in, borrow some books and get out again.

Actually, I’m lying. If it’s a children’s library, I also want somewhere to take him to the toilet! It may not seem like much, but it is so essential for any child, especially if you’re spending more than 10 minutes somewhere. Again, this did exist at Birmingham Library.

I have to admit, the children’s book selection was probably the main let-down. There were clearly loads on offer, but it was incredibly busy and the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, so when I went to select some board books, I only found one in the relevant section. There may have been other sections of board books that I missed but, well, I missed them. So to my mind, they weren’t there. Having said that, both my friend and I had to talk to staff on separate occasions, and they were incredibly friendly and helpful. I’m sure, had I asked, that they would have helped me hunt some down.

I didn’t ask because my son was having a grand time without them, and I wasn’t going to borrow any anyway as we don’t live in Birmingham, and he has a wonderful selection from our small, but incredibly well stocked, local library. (I’m going to mention Fishponds Library in East Bristol here, because I love it. I love it a million times more now that I’m a mother. Small, but perfectly formed, my son loves it there too. We love the books, and also that staff let us head into the children’s section and have a play).

A lovely touch above the book shelves:
Small people statues with signs that read things such as:
"Don't worry, be happy!"

So, overall, very high marks for the children’s section. Now, because I was with a wonderful friend who always puts me first, she let me have a look around the rest of the library whilst she kept the kids amused downstairs. Which, firstly, means I got to use the stairs. But I also got to see the entirety of the library. About half way round, I became very disappointed that I didn’t actually want anything. A large part of me wanted to be on some sort of mission so I could see how successful I would be. But I did enjoy looking around, and especially loved the outside areas on the upper floors, which gave brilliant views of Birmingham. The building really has attempted to please everybody, with areas for meetings, areas for tourists, areas for scholars, and areas for those that just wanted to find a novel. And yes, there were still plenty of books. It still feels like a library. But it also feels like a public space which you can use in a multitude of ways. Which I think (and hope) is what they were aiming to achieve.

On my way back down to the children’s section, I was lucky enough to overhear a couple of people on some sort of tour. The member of staff was explaining how the building was designed to keep the right noise levels in the right places. The top of the building is quiet, with the noise very contained, whilst the bottom of the building is the noisy children’s area. I hadn’t really thought about it until it was mentioned, but this did actually work really well. When I had been up on the top floors it was very peaceful – the noise from below didn’t carry at all. So often libraries seem to be built and get the way noise carries totally wrong – I was pleasantly surprised that this wasn’t the case here.

The library does also look beautiful. Because I am a librarian, I have the benefit of hearing what my colleagues learn about when they go on professional development courses. One colleague explained that the library “took its identity from the urban landscape (gasometers and iron bridges, etc.) which means that the façade reflects the landscape.  The shapes of the ironwork on the exterior also impact significantly on the interior through shadows”. Whilst this reasoning for the façade may not have instantly occurred to me, it does look pretty good, and certainly (I think) fits with the central Birmingham landscape.

All in all, I really enjoyed our visit to The Library of Birmingham. Almost everything I hoped it would have (and be) it did (and was). I certainly came out feeling relaxed and like I’d had an enjoyable afternoon. Having said that, please don’t take away my local library for the sake of one amazing library like this. Visiting the Library of Birmingham was a great experience, but I’m not sure what I’d do with my Tuesday afternoons if my son and I couldn’t go to Fishponds Library anymore.