We need your money: support an unfashionable library!

Prince William is an Aston Villa fan, not because he was born in Birmingham, but because he and his Eton friends chose to support unfashionable football teams, rather than the usual Chelsea or Arsenal. But I’d like to suggest that rich people start thinking about which unfashionable library they’re going to support as well. You don’t need to have a particular link to Sandwell, but perhaps an Etonian West Bromwich Albion fan would like to help its local libraries as well?

My old college, Somerville, regularly asks me for money, and Oxford University is now aiming to raise £3 billion, having reached its original target of £1.25 billion in record time. Oxford needs the money so it can compete with Harvard, Yale and the other Ivy League colleges but Sandwell needs the money so its children can compete with other UK children in education and the job market. If you give our libraries money, you’ll be in a much smaller, more exclusive club than the Oxford donors!

If you decide to give millions to public libraries, make sure your accountant ties the money up well, so the councils don’t spend it on something else or decide that they can give up on their own commitment to libraries. But if you have a smaller amount, you might like to pay for every library in Sandwell to have an annual visit from each the following:

• a popular children’s author
• a professional children’s story teller
• Ronnie Crackers (or some other wonderful children’s entertainer).

Or a new roof for Langley Library, please.

Memories of the old Birmingham Library and its football programmes

The new Library of Birmingham opened this week and the publicity about it has been amazing, both for the city of Birmingham and for public libraries in general. I love the look of it (although my friends are divided about it), and plan to visit as soon as I can.
However, I have very fond memories of the old Central Library, now regarded as a fine example of brutalist architecture. When I trained to be a librarian in 2002 my masters dissertation looked at the content of Aston Villa football matchday programmes from 1980 to 2002 (conclusion: very little had changed). I spent a wonderful few days in the library looking through their programme archives, reading about the club I loved and talking about the project with the friendly librarians. The library was massive and a bit haphazard in layout, so you had to walk through lots of other book collections to get to the section you wanted, but that was part of its charm, at least to me. If you were in a hurry to find something or preferred a cleaner, more stylish look, I can see it might not have been ideal but hopefully the new Library of Birmingham will be beautiful and efficient as well as charming.