I Had Always Thought,

that people who design libraries must be pretty smart,

but it appears that is not always the case, take the flagship £190 million Library Of Birmingham, the staff there cannot access tens of thousands of books, because they can’t reach them! the design called for many reference, research books and old periodicals be kept in what is known as ‘the stack’ – storage areas with special containers which are closed to the public, but some one designed them so high that Health and Safety stepped in and now the material stored in 'the stack' is no longer available,


Brian Gambles, director of the Library of Birmingham, said: “We fully understand how popular materials in the closed stack areas of the Library of Birmingham are and it is frustrating that we haven’t yet been able to give our customers access to them, We need mobile platform lift devices to enable safe working at heights, the contractor has not as yet supplied an option which satisfies all our requirements, so we are testing alternatives.”


with material being unavailable to researchers for 18 months Medieval historian George Demidowicz, of the University of Birmingham, described the situation as a ‘tragedy and a scandal’, He said: 'the library is great to gawp at, but it is unfit for purpose', and there was me thinking that the people who design libraries were the smart guys!