After more than four years in the brewing, I’m delighted to be able to share the final evaluation report for Everything to Everybody (E2E), an ambitious and inspiring 4-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.

IN TOTAL, 270,500+ people participated in E2E activity across the project lifetime, of whom 11,793 had a close-up view of the First Folio.

It is estimated that visits to E2E events generated an additional economic benefit
to the Birmingham economy of over £900,000 in that time.

The very best thing that the partnership achieved was also a national first: they 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.

It was an incredible pleasure and privilege to see how much people enjoyed and valued the chance to look at the book, find out more about its history as the People’s Folio, and share their own Shakespeare stories with the academics and library staff who accompanied it.

E2E provided a valuable testbed for University of Birmingham’s new Culture Forward programme of cultural and civic partnership activity and has given staff at Library of Birmingham new impetus and valuable digital resources to celebrate the magnificent collections it holds and share them with the City.

Credit where it’s due, I led a team of associates to complete this evaluation as it was HUGE!

I’ll post again about some of the case studies we created, but for now… enjoy the report!

The whole project was supported by funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, History West Midlands, Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games and a number of private donors.