Images from London & Berlin

I returned to work earlier this week after a rather hectic two weeks in both London and Berlin. Initially I had a workshop and a short presentation about our future library at the Internet Librarian International conference in London, and I made a lot of side-visits to some libraries and other recent buildings, some of which were recommended by our Library Retrieval System building architects, Hassell.

My visits in London included:

• The London School of Economics and Politics (LSE) Library (a Norman Foster rebuild)
• The British Library (in particular the inspirational Business & IP Centre and the Growing Knowledge exhibition)
• The Natural History Museum (in particular the new Darwin Centre "Cocoon" structure)
• The Victoria & Albert Museum
• The National Gallery (no interior photography allowed)
• The National Portrait Gallery (no interior photography allowed)
• The Tate Modern
• The British Museum (particularly Norman Foster's Great Court enclosure)
• The Serpentine Gallery Pavillion 2010 (just before it closed) and
• Norman Foster's 30 St Mary Axe building (twice because it is so awesome)

I then spent three nights in Berlin around visits to three relatively new academic libraries that my boss had identified as being of interest to us: the Philological Library of the Free University, the VW-Haus of the Technical University and the central University Library of Humboldt University in Berlin "Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum". In addition, I managed to visit the following sites:

• The Memorial to German Resistance
• The Bauhaus Archive
• The Berlin (Modern Art) Gallery
• The external areas of the Jewish Museum and
• The Topography of Terror Museum & Library

I will present my findings to staff at some stage and also write a couple of blog posts about what I saw and learnt, but in the meantime, you may like to take a look at the images I've uploaded to Flickr (last ten sets): http://www.flickr.com/photos/malbooth/sets/