Deansgate library visit
The John Rylands library, Deansgate
The week 3 on-campus class will see us make a field trip to the John Rylands Library, in Deansgate, Manchester. This is one of the UK’s most historic libraries, and we will be visiting it in order that you can see how a specialist library like this works behind the scenes, and the many roles it fulfills in the preservation, management and dissemination of information.
The visit will take place at the usual class time – in 2012, that is, Monday 13th February. We will meet at the Deansgate library at 2pm. If you want to go straight there, that is fine. But if you want to walk up from the campus, meet at our usual classroom, by my office, at 1.30pm. Please be prompt! We will leave at 1.30 sharp, and the tour will start at Deansgate at 2pm exactly.
If you need directions, see http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/deansgate/. Remember, this is not the John Rylands University Library, on campus: it is in the city centre.
Beyond being physically present, you do not need to bring anything or make special preparations for the trip.
Distance students are welcome to join us at this trip if they want, and are able to. Please let Drew know if you will be attending. However, I appreciate this is unlikely to be possible for most of you. Therefore, I will be filming parts of the visit and some interviews with key personnel in the library (i.e. an archive specialist, an information retrieval specialist, etc.) talking about their work, and putting these together into what I hope will be around a 20-minute film, which I will try to get ready for as soon as possible after the trip (but being honest, is unlikely to emerge before the end of February).
I also encourage you, if you can, to visit a specialist library like this in your own city or country. Many are open to the public and will hold tours. Seeing what a specialist library like this does is, I think, a useful element of this course because it shows us that libraries are not simply repositories for books – but play a valuable role in information management and preservation, and that this is a discipline that takes specialist skills and knowledge.
Media and Information Literacy by Andrew Whitworth/University of Manchester is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
