Opinion: it's about the collections

Hurray, they haven't listed the Central Library in Birmingham! They're going to knock it down!

A library is a place for preserving and giving access to collections. There's a lot of discussion about what the building looks like, but not much said about what's in it.

The Museums, Libraries, and Archives Council has designated 6 of Birmingham's collections as being of international and national importance. Nationally, 38 collections were designated in 28 institutions and included only two other public libraries, Bristol and Westminster who were designated for one collection each.

The collections in the Central Library include the largest and richest collection of photographic material in a public library (over 2 million items ranging from nineteenth-century pioneers of photography to the work of Birmingham's diverse and active community of documentary photographers); over 6000 archive collections occupying the archives of the industrial innovators Boulton and Watt; an early and fine printing collection numbering almost 13,000 items, of which 8,200 were printed before 1701; a Literature collection that includes one of the best Shakespeare collections in the country.

Here's a web site containing images from these collections.

The building simply doesn't provide adequate storage space for these collections. And without decent storage and exhibition space, (and more cataloguing, but that's another argument) they can't be made accessible. The present library was never designed to be an archive building.

And having carried many, many boxes of records up four flights of stairs from the basement to our office, and having worked for three years in a room with no natural light, I can't wait to see it go.