On Libraries old and new…

You may have noticed on ITP Twitter and Facebook that we’re currently developing our very own library!

One of the great things about taking part in the ITP is the chance to gain invaluable resources such as books, journals and materials for your home institutions. Each year we receive a range of requests, but there are always a few titles that keep coming up. Books on museum management, education and curating always seem to be popular, with increasingly global perspectives as the years go by.

Basing our first steps on these popular titles, we’ve decided to start collecting for our own library space within the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan.

We hope that future ITPers can come along and borrow books they might need while in the UK, or sit and have a quiet moment away from the madness of the programme.

Any suggestions for books are welcome in the comments below, or feel free to email me at itp@britishmuseum.org.

Speaking of libraries,  we are very excited to have seen the beautiful and fascinating new take on a very old example, the cuneiform ibrary of Ashurbanipal! Curators Irving Finkel and Sally Fletcher introduced the refreshed and revitalised Mesopotamian gallery this morning at our weekly staff breakfast.

The gallery has been brightened, with bold coloured panels allowing previously neglected objects to stand out and grab visitors’ attention. The beautiful Ishtar lion is now facing an equally impressive panel of the Assyrian attack on Memphis, framed in a vibrant red.

Among the most important considerations in the redisplay was the question of how to make visitors feel as if they were in an actual library of the ancient past, to give valuable visual context to the collection.

You can see the final wonderful result in the image above, and can read all about HOW the gallery was redone, and the concepts and ideas behind the redisplay from John Taylor, our curator of among other things, cuneiform collections.

We look forward to your comments, and happy reading!