Visit to the British Library

Despite attempts made by the weather we weren’t deterred from visiting the British Library this week. Our staff here have been looking forward to becoming more familiar with the UK’s national library for a number of months and having the opportunity to discover some of its hidden gems first-hand. It was fascinating to learn more about how this institution operates. The British Library is not just of huge cultural importance but also assists with important day-to-day services here at the Albert Sloman and elsewhere. Most of the inter-library loan requests taken from staff and students through us here are retrieved from the British Library. Their extensive collection is a truly impressive resource. With the rights to a copy of every UK and Irish publication their collection includes over 150 million items and is continuously growing – by 12km a year. It’s a good first port of call for those books and journals that aren’t normally included in an academic library’s collections, and they operate the world’s largest document delivery service.

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Learning Spaces – Education Conference 2018

On the 11th the Essex Business School hosted a conference exploring the relationship between spaces (of any variety) and learning. The event really made me question the way that spaces, in all their forms, directly and indirectly influence our thinking and behaviour. At one time or another all of us have been made aware of the impact classrooms have on our ability to learn. Noise, size, temperature, windows and lighting can all help or hinder our attempts us to function at our best capacity. As the keynote speaker, Marty Jacobs, noted in his talk, we tend to notice how a space is designed once it interferes with our intentions – the lack of acoustics in a lecture theatre that muffles a speaker’s voice or the rows of desks in a classroom that forces us to swivel around to talk to the person behind us.

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Lecture Theatre at Essex Business School

 

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The Forum at Southend

One of the interesting things I was looking forward to whilst being a trainee was getting to visit different kinds of libraries. On a sunny day in December (no really), four library staff from the Colchester campus headed to Southend to visit our colleagues at The Forum.

The Forum is a partnership project, bringing together Southend-on-Sea Borough Council, the University of Essex and South Essex College. There are approximately 1000-1400 students from the university, within the departments of School of Health and Social Care, East 15 Acting School, the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, and Essex Business School. Having worked in both in public and university libraries I was interested to find out how an academic and a public library could work together. Would students revising for end-of-term exams be faced with the lively sound of toddlers singing ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’ during a weekly Rhymetime? Or would academic library staff be approached by members of the public wanting to know how to renew their bus passes online?

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Albert Sloman’s 50th Anniversary

 

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One of the perks of being a trainee here at the Albert Sloman is the chance we are given to become familiar with the library secrets and stories that most users are unaware of.  We are then able to share this knowledge with visitors during tours on open days and library events. As part of the Albert Sloman’s 50th anniversary, a gathering for alumni was held on the 7th December where former students were able to meet, discuss their memories and take a look at collections and areas that are not normally on display. Because an entirely new section of the library was officially opened a few years ago, there have undoubtedly been changes since many of our alumni last set foot in the building. A brand new library reading room with 24 hour access has been opened this academic year, and there is a new wing from 2015 which has a great view of the surrounding parkland.

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