£289,000 awarded for Digital Future at Coventry Libraries

Coventry Libraries has been granted a fantastic chance to develop its digital services.

The service, in conjunction with digital support agency The Room, has been granted a £289,000 Arts Council grant to establish a Digital Culture Program.

Coventry Libraries Service and The Space will form a modern Creative Multimedia Space within the Central Library, focused on augmented reality and audio installations through existing media collections and digital archives, in collaboration with BBC Archives and Radio 3, the British Film Institute, and the Media Archive for Central England.

The material will be user-friendly, popular, and of high quality, with the intention of promoting more learning. Audio experiences will be curated in a library listening paradise intended to encourage well-being and relaxing, where library visitors will come and create room for slow and reflective time, de-stress, and be exposed to a diverse range of sound experiences.

Research on the initiative will also take place at Bell Green, Foleshill, and Tile Hill libraries, which are all located outside of Central Library. Artists will collaborate with urban audiences to develop their own multimedia content and form cultural provision, in addition to providing virtual reality and audio experiences.

The focus of the project will be on new artistic media, with digital media collections and content sourced directly from Coventry’s communities.

“This is an exciting chance to improve the city’s digital culture,” said Cllr Kevin Maton, Cabinet Member for Education and Skills. I’d like to express my gratitude to the Arts Council for their support, as well as those who worked tirelessly to secure it.

“This is the kind of innovative material that a digital library service should be providing, using cutting-edge technologies to enable us to experience content in new and challenging ways. As Covid limits are increasingly lifted, this portends interesting days ahead, which we will all look forward to.”

The cultural program’s live activities will begin in the autumn of 2021 and run until April of 2022.

Audiences will have the opportunity to not only see high-quality work from a variety of writers, designers, performers, and filmmakers, but also to add their own stories to the cultural initiative.