British Library, the national library of the United Kingdom, has opened its revamped and expanded Learning Centre, the Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre. Funded entirely through private donations, the Learning Centre offers pupils and teachers cutting-edge facilities to support digital literacy skills as well as first-hand encounters with historic manuscripts, sound recordings, maps and letters.
According to the British Library, the Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre provides a bright, spacious and inspiring space in which young learners will be able to explore the Library's collections and develop their digital research skills. The £500,000 project was funded by donations from the Dorset Foundation, the Wolfson Foundation, John Lyon's Charity, British Library Patrons and others. Construction and refurbishment work took place during the summer with minimal disruption to the Learning programme.
Around 17,000 young learners and 3,000 teachers, adult learners and family groups take part in the British Library's Learning Programme every year, which is aimed mainly at secondary school pupils (aged 11-19) but also caters for younger and older groups. Through workshops, curator talks and tours, learners explore primary sources such as historic newspapers, diaries, manuscripts, sound recordings and maps.
The Learning Centre is fully digitally-enabled, with laptops for every pupil, electronic whiteboards, state of the art audio-visual facilities and - for the first time - video-conferencing facilities and remote viewing equipment, which will allow workshops and curator talks using collection items to be offered to similarly-equipped schools anywhere in the country.
School groups will be using the Learning Centre from next week and an extensive programme of workshops and study sessions is planned for the Library's forthcoming major exhibition on the English language, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices, which opens on November 12.
As the national library of the UK, the British Library seeks to provide world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The British Library's collections include 150 million items from every era of written human history beginning with Chinese oracle bones dating from 300 BC, right up to the latest e-journals.
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