What should the Library of Birmingham be and do?

I had the privilege today to put some ideas to the team building Birmingham’s new “Library of Birmingham”, which is due to open in 2013, just after (hopefully) Birmingham is announced as City of Culture.

The building, designed by Mecanoo, has gone through several quite public debates that I won’t go into here. The site is decided, it’s going ahead, work has begun. Interestingly a few weeks ago I heard that there were a few people complaining that while the design of the building’s shell had been more or less been completed, the decisions about the actual contents of the building, nor what it was going to function as had not been decided.

Brilliant. Trying to think four years ahead to what we’re going to be doing or needing would doom this project to failure by implementing rushed ideas that would seem dated by the time they were implemented.

Instead we have some room to think about what we as people who live and work in Birmingham would want from a library.

So today I attended a short presentation organised by Dave Harte where I, and a few other digital media types got the chance to talk about our work and what we think the Library should do and be.

There was plenty of conversation about some very futuristic specifics – Augmented Reality, RFID tags, knitted pandas, game-based learning, video mashups of archive footage… Did I mention the knitted pandas?

Here are a few notes from my presentation, which seemed to go down quite well despite its brevity at 20 minutes: