Reading Central Library

Check out the website: http://www.reading.gov.uk/centrallibrary

Image taken from Bill Nicholls for the Geograph Project, https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2215051

While visiting a friend in Reading (pronounced Red-Ding, sadly), we decided to visit the Reading Central Library, a branch of the Reading Boroughs Library. This is a public library, and unfortunately had the same woes of any other public library. The library has three floors, but is still running out of space that they were having a book sale of unused  and copies of books and maps.

My guide for today was the librarian assistant of this branch library, Virginia Hobbs, who works part-time in this branch library, and full-time as a branch manager at the Tilehurst Library, another branch of the Boroughs Library. She was very knowledgeable of the history and organization of the Central Library, yet she still doesn't understand how the Reading collections (comprising of Reading maps, history books, biographies, the Boroughs Council, and local studies), are organized on the third floor. They are a unique code of letter strands such as BSXE/KH and BN6/DY.

Regardless, the nonfiction were organized in a modified Dewey Decimal System, but not like the Barbican Library. Instead, Hobbs suggests they were shelved this way because of running out of space. For instance, the educations books with the call numbers in the 370s fill up a free-standing shelf, yet behind that same shelf only has engineering books with the call numbers 620. The 621+ call numbers are on a shelves by the wall.

The fiction shelves were also organized by subject rather than just in the alphabet. They were grouped and color-coded to pink for Romance, blue for Historical, purple for Chillers, and many more. However, there are other colors added to these groups. A muddy brown sticker indicates a classic book, while a gold star indicates a black or Asian author. A rainbow sticker also indicates the author was LGBT+.

This library, like the Barbican, is just trying its best to be a library for all kinds of people. In fact they have a large collection of books in all kinds of European, Indian, and other Asian languages. They even have an e-library. Their concerns, at least expressed by Hobbes, is that the government keeps the budget tight and the hours small.