Edinburgh Central Library

The Edinburgh Central Library is a lending library for the city.  It was opened on June 9, 1890 as a Carnegie Library and this year they celebrate 125 years of being opened. 

Our visit started with us going to the George Washington Brown meeting room to talk about what we will be doing at the library: tours of the library and three talks from professionals at the library.  For our tours, we were split in to three groups and were led to different areas of the library so that we could all hear and see the library while not running in to each other.  The places we saw in the library on my tour are: the children's library, the central lending library, we talked about the art and design library, reference, and the mezzanine which is where the music collection, video collection, teen area, the Edinburgh and Scotland collections, and one acoustic pod for groups. 

Once the tour was over, we made it back to the meeting room where we were given coffee or tea for our three talks.  The first talk was by Karen O'Brien called "Never Too Old" about the history of the library, acquisitions, and some of the items in their collections.  The second talk was by Sarah Forteath about some of the outreach programs that the library hosts and about how to get more users in to the library.  The last talk was by Alison Stoddart about the digital side of the library.  All three of the talks were interesting and informative.  This visit was by far one of my favorites because the setup of our visit was different then our other tours.  One of the facts that I learned about the library on my tour is that the library is two buildings that were merged together in the 1930s when they acquired the building next door.