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/
