Hard hats at the ready!

Work starts on site on Monday!  We’ve appointed Triton Construction as the main contractor, and I’ll be keeping you updated on progress with the building works over the next few months.  In a few weeks we’ll be able to release the architects’ fly-through so you can “visit” the new centre virtually.

Looking forward to donning my high-vis vest and hard hat and seeing work in progress.

But for now, here are the final photos of what used to be the University’s Cafe on 3rd:

Entrance from Central Services Atrium (with yellow brick road)
Entrance from Central Services Atrium (with yellow brick road)
IMAG0076
Entrance staircase between Atrium and centre
IMAG0077
Old cafe on 3rd entrance – to become entrance to new centre
IMAG0079
Old cafe on 3rd servery (with kitchen behind) – to become new repository
IMAG0080
Old cafe on 3rd seating area – to become new public exploration, group and research space

HLF project update

There’s been lots of activity since I last posted about how the overall project is progressing – and still more going on behind the scenes getting the final specifications for the building works right, going through the tender process, and so on.

As well as making a lot of progress with our name and branding for the new centre, we’ve also been out to tender for conservation services to repair records that are too damaged to use without intervention, and for digitisation services to help us preserve vulnerable formats like Betamax video and audio cassette tapes, as well as digitising a selection from the collections to make them available off site.

Regular readers will have noticed, however, lots of collections updates on the blog recently – and the most exciting and tangible thing to report is our Collections Access Officers (both HLF and National Cataloguing Grants Programme) are in post and going full steam ahead on uncovering and exposing the collections entrusted to us.  Kelda’s already posted about her work so far on the Rugby League board archive and Rob on the discoveries made so far in the British Music Collection, and they’ll be posting regularly.

For me, these two pictures encapsulate a lot of what our HLF project is all about: making the collections more available, and in better facilities than those available to us at the moment (this is the Library’s seminar room, used for a couple of hours in between teaching so that Kelda & Rob can spread material out to sort it):

Kelda Apr 2014
Kelda working on rugby league
Rob Apr 2014
Rob working on the composer files from the British Music Collection