Birmingham University Open Day

Strictly the “community day” which we attended mainly to see the new library and where Frances works. The events were a mixture of fairground type( inflatable castles, swing boats etc ), stalls ( mainly food ) and exhibits organised showing the work of the University.

The University demo which attracted most attention from me  was their mini interferometer which was built around their work as part of the international team on LIGO ( Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory). LIGO has gone through several iterations to enhance its sensitivity. Essentially the idea is to measure two distances at right angles to one another to detect their difference caused by ripples in space-time.

These ripples are a prediction of relativity but they are incredibly small so that until very recently their detection was not possible. Now however three events have been seen in the past 3 years. The detector splits a laser light beam in two sending them multiple times down a 4 kilometre vacuum tube then recombining them so that any change in the interference pattern enables very precise measurement of the two arms distance. The precision has to be absolutely phenomenal as we are talking a billion, billion, billionth of a metre or about a thousandth the diameter of a proton.

The mini rig displayed had arms of only a few 10’s of centimetres but even so it was incredibly sensitive. It was sitting on a steel table and just lightly pressing on the table resulted in a change seen clearly.

Gravitational waves are caused by very large mass disturbances such as black holes merging. All astronomical measurements up to now are by electromagnetic waves ( ie light and its relatives ) but in principle gravitational waves offer a new way of seeing the universe.

After a picnic on the patio outside the new library we were shown around by Frances. We were joined in our picnic by their friends Yen, Dave and their daughter Lil. Lil is about the same age as Alice. The library has about 50 kilometres of shelving about 80% full, or some 2.1 million volumes. As Frances said this just an estimate as who is counting. The whole building of 4 storeys around a central atrium has been well fitted out. It seemed almost luxurious to my eyes but times have changed. There is masses of study space all fitted with computers while portable computers for use in the library can be borrowed.

Frances is in a large open plan office with orthopaedic chairs and individual desks with all the IT resource one could imagine. There is a nice staff room with many facilities.. She is on the office side by large windows overlooking university square.

The library is effectively divided into two parts: the open access upper floors and the vast research archive in the basement. The basement is fitted with rollable storage racking which is much more compact than shelving. The books are arranged by Library of Congress classification.

When I worked in a research library fifty years ago we had a similar arrangement although our basement rollable stacking was more primitive and much smaller with only a dozen units compared with more than one hundred at Birmingham.

The research archive is better used because academics are partly judged by the papers they publish which for many outside science will involve archive investigation. In contrast when I was an Information Scientist for Unilever the archive was rarely used; I guess I only accessed it a half dozen times.

Although the library is massive,  with thirty thousand students and many hundreds of staff the University makes full use of it.

A party trick is the returned book arrangement. A robotic sorter takes the return and deposits it in an appropriate bin ready for reshelving. Frances “borrowed” a book to show us the automated system. I had assumed that the automatic borrowing facilities relied on barcodes and I solemnly scan each individual code at Whitby library. I learn that many now use radio tags ( RFID ) as Whitby which make barcodes obsolete.