It’s great to be able to say hello to our early arrivals who have been stopping by the Library the last few days. Ask library staff all your questions, pop your head around the office door during the week and say hello to the library skills drop-in librarian or chat to us online 24/7 for instant answers to all your questions.

The Library elves have been hard at work fetching and carrying books this summer just gone, finding ways to arrange them so they take up less space. Not only does this mean we can fit in more study space for you to enjoy, but anyone in a wheelchair now has access to the gender neutral, accessible toilets in area 1C.

Another open day arrives! Let’s hope the weather holds up. Friendly Library staff will be here to greet you all day and help you find your way around the building, with informal tours Library offered between 10 am – 12 noon. Help yourself to our promotional postcards, which tell you a little bit more about what we offer, and check out more content here on the Library blog and website for much more online.

Enjoy “BIRD”, the MA Photography showcase free this week at Jack House Gallery. The work on show is selected from larger photographic projects, each the result of extensive and ongoing research and may be viewed as a showcase for photography itself, as a medium uniquely suited to practice-based enquiry.

We are updating our WiFi network next week to the dizzying connection speeds offered by WiFi 6. We are assured this is a wonderful thing. The not-quite-so-welcome news is that this means replacing the old WiFi connection boxes on the ceiling, leaving each area of the Library in turn without WiFi for about half an hour.

We are continually told that to make sense of the world being pulled over our eyes, we need media literacy to understand how and when we are being lied to by generative AI that is amplifying the biases in existing media reporting, entrenching inequalities and teaching people from early childhood. What is terrifying is that unless we are very careful, we will never notice because it is not given to humankind to question things that meet our expectations. A brief sojourn through the ways we are manipulated shows us how we are being led deeper into the mire of our existing societal prejudices and also how we can choose to begin the slow process of wading back out again.