Discoveries at the IWM Discovery Centre

Last week I joined the excellent Local Studies Group South/APML tour of the new Discover History Centre (aka library) at the Imperial War Museum London. I won’t give a full description of the excellent work they do at the IWM because they have agreed to do another tour in 2014 (ADVERT – to express an interest in the tour, please e-mail tony.pilmer@tiscali.co.uk – END OF ADVERT) – so I’ll just say a couple of things that really interested me.

Sadly, the old round reading room has gone (though it does mean they don’t have to carry all those books up those stairs!) – instead they have an inner and outer reading room. The concept is great – they want to entice casual visitors into the outer space so they can find out more about anything that interests them. The can do this through looking the general books on the shelves and tables, search the museum databases and, if there is room in the inner sanctum, the enquiry staff can call up some amazing stuff from the stacks.

The other great thing is that there is lots of warfare magazines, so it will also attract the many fans of public library warfare sections and readers of Jane’s Manuals. There was certainly a buzz in there. Currently the IWM is a building site, so hopefully readers will continue to go through the centre doors once the permanent exhibits are there to distract casual visitors.

The other great thing is that there are lots of warfare magazines, so it will also attract the many fans of public library warfare sections and readers of Jane’s Manuals. There was certainly a buzz in there. Currently the IWM is a building site, so hopefully readers will continue to go through the centre doors once the permanent exhibits are there to distract casual visitors.

Another thing really interested me. The museum has got just about all the visitors that they can handle, so the emphasis is getting people to see the IWM material online. I really felt that they thought that a virtual visit was just as important, if not more important, than someone coming through the door – how refreshing! I was talking to one librarian recently and they were saying that they only got a fraction of the  enquiries on Saturdays compared to ten years ago – but we are gaining hundreds or thousands more virtual visit though our online collections. If we both local studies guys and our masters agreed with the IWM guys that virtual visits are really important, perhaps we should be really radical and say we should opening our doors less so we can put more of our amazing stuff online?