Singalong

The books I order for work are not usually this beautiful or entertaining but building up our well-being and leisure collections lets me stray away from my usual law library choices for lovely items like this.

As well as the beautiful illustrations, it features some reproductions of BL artworks https://inews.co.uk/culture/sea-shanty-tiktok-craze-what-songs-british-library-book-publication-brought-forward-832171

A load of us at work were at a Research Libraries conference and somehow we got on to the topic of sea shanties after watching a discussion of libraries as community and entertainment space as well as academic spaces. One HE Librarian was shown DJing in his library space.  The session was also centred around discussions of ‘the open library’ and the speakers were encouraging people to think behind open content to open space for communities. The National and public sector libraries have also had this community focus but HE libraries have not embraced this in the same way yet, although great strides have been made in open content.

We are forever looking forward to a new build or refurbishment of our library spaces so maybe that will give us opportunities to improve the openness of our spaces.