The Barbican

On our trip to the Barbican we learned a great deal about the center itself, its creation, and why it is such an important institution in London. The Barbican is an international art center, and was designed as a gift to the nation. Many aspects of the public library are similar to libraries in the United States, which I found to be interesting. I especially enjoyed the tour of the music library, because I have never before been in a library just for music.

The music library was opened in 1983, one year later than the rest of the center. It is a single-subject library, entirely devoted to music. Richard Jones gave us the tour, and he explained that often music services are cut when funding runs short, but the Barbican music library is lucky in that it is well funded. Music does not come bound, and the library is obligated to send it off for binding when it is purchased. This can be very costly. One of the functions of the music library is to support the tradition of choral singing. Often the library will be asked to gather a large number of copies of a specific song for a choral group. This is accomplished through interlibrary loans.

The reference section of the music library is extensive, and contains books such as: recording guides, rare record price guides, the Dictionary of Musical Themes, the Dictionary of Tunes, the International Who’s Who of Popular Music, etc. The Dictionary of Musical Themes can be used by musicians to find a song that they know the music for, by transposing the music to middle C, and looking it up in the index. Non-musical people can use the Dictionary of Tunes to find a song in a similar manner, but by using ups and downs to represent the notes. There are listening booths for patron use in this section of the library.

The Barbican music library is the flagship library in London for CDs. It contains 16,000+ titles. When a new CD is released the libraries are obligated to put it on hold from being checked out for three months. This is a stipulation from the recording industry, so that people are not able to check out new releases instead of purchasing them. The library has its own classification scheme for CDs, because classifying artists into specific genres is often quite difficult. This is why the library uses very broad categories. It was fascinating to learn so much about music libraries and librarianship, especially because it is an area that I had never considered before.

For more on the Barbican visit their website at www.barbicon.org.uk.

In the evening we returned to the Barbican to see Nevermore, which told the story of Edgar Allen Poe's life. It was wonderful! The costumes and the dark nature of his life story reminded me of a Tim Burton film. The seven actors were fantastic, and I loved how one simple change in each of their costumes made them into an entirely different character. This was a great experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it.