London Library

At a time when my local public library in Michigan cannot get the necessary $30 more per year from each household to stay open, the subscription based London Library is a luxurious change of pace. The library in Michigan is a top quality public library with several types of useful resources, but unfortunately the general public does not appreciate its worth. All the library needed was 30 measly dollars per year, which was not much considering residents did not have to pay an increase in a couple decades. To visit the London Library and see people shell out roughly $600 per year to be able to use the collection of books was a wonderful sight.

The London Library is the world's largest independent library, it greatly appreciates the continued support from T.S. Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot. T.S. Eliot was once the president of the London Library, and of course, a patron. This was the library Charles Dickens used to research the French Revolution while writing "A Tale of Two Cities." The collection surrounds the humanities, while there is a science section, it has more to do with history of science than actual science itself. The library prides itself on offering "five star service," in that the library will go to many lengths to find satisfy the patron. Whenever a person first becomes a member, they get a one on one meeting with a librarian to get oriented with the library, and see the location of where their unique interests lie. The backdrop is royal, with deep eggplant purple walls lined with a multitude of hardcopy books without their dust jackets. The library only contains nothing but books, no DVD's, CD's, online databases, or anything else. Patrons include writers, researchers, artists, and people who just have a general interest in the collection as well. Patrons are privy to some very old, rare books, and can take home just about anything in the collection. Only 3% of the collection is not available for circulation. I'm guessing many individuals would not even want to be responsible for taking those highly valuable books home anyway.

One unique feature of this library is that it has its own quirky cataloging system. Creating this system could not have been easy, but it seems to work very well for this library. My cataloging professor assigns a tough final, but also offers students the choice to instead create their own complete cataloging system. In the several years that he has been teaching, no one has ever taken him up on that challenge. This system is more user friendly in that there are no numbers, only letters and words that create the individual record for each book. For example, art books will always begin with "A", then a word which describes the category of art represented in the book. This system is great for browsing, which I am sure is a feature many patrons enjoy.