A Better Mousetrap

Early in March of this year — at just about the same time that February's issue of NLW with its editorial on “Libraries and the Visiting Firemen” and Bryan Bacon's accompanying piece on British public libraries revisited plopped onto my desk — the Barbican Centre celebrated its third birthday. During those three years over 5.5 million visitors have followed our equivalent of Oz's yellow brick road: two thin yellow lines painted on the pavement from Moorgate and Barbican tube stations and leading into the heart of the Centre. The majority, of course, come to be entertained by the Royal Shakespeare Company or the London Symphony Orchestra, to view the latest exhibition in the Barbican Gallery or Concourse, to attend a conference or to see the latest release in Cinema One. Of that 5.5 million, however, over one million have visited and/or used the Barbican Library. As the City's largest lending library with a registered membership of almost 45,000 (and still growing) the majority of the 1300 people who visit the Library each day are, of course, coming in specifically to borrow books and sound recordings and — as such — are virtually indistinguishable from their library‐using counterparts elsewhere in the UK. Indeed, particularly within Greater London and the home counties, they are likely to be exactly the same people! Many, however, are visitors in the true sense of the term and a substantial proportion of them are “visiting firemen”.