Making Exeter's museum collections available to everyone
The University of Exeter is helping to ensure the amazing collections of local museums are accessible to everyone, through open access to digital resources
Everything to Everybody: restoring Shakespeare to Birmingham residents
17 January 2025
Everything to Everybody (E2E) was an ambitious four-year project led jointly by the University of Birmingham and Birmingham City Council’s Library of Birmingham to restore the world’s first, oldest and largest Shakespeare collection in any public library to every city resident.
The project took the city’s precious, 400-year-old First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays out of the Library to 16 community venues including libraries, shopping centres, a family centre, a church and a prison.
In total, more than 270,500 people participated in activities across the project lifetime, including 60 partners and events delivered at 40 venues across Birmingham. It is estimated that visits to the project’s events generated an additional economic benefit to the Birmingham economy of over £900,000 in that time.
The project recruited 45 volunteers recruited, who contributed over 1,290 days. With community and cultural partnerships embedded throughout the project, the city’s communities contributed through family days, open days, workshops, community-curated exhibitions, digital exhibitions and neighbourhood productions.
The project also made significant improvements to the management and condition of the Shakespeare Memorial Library (SML) and George Dawson Collection (GDC). The catalogue is now enhanced and digitised, available for all to see online, as is the First Folio itself and the poster collection.
Delivered between January 2020 and 31 December 2023, E2E was supported by a total grant of £791,400 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund (Heritage Fund), as well as funding from History West Midlands, Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games and private donors. The total project value was over £2 million.
