Critics used to love to hit out at our own dear British Library, the father of them all. Understandably. The crippling delays that affected its design and construction were extraordinary even by the habitually stop-go standards of UK national projects. It should have been completed in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. As the computer age advanced, many questioned whether it was necessary at all. But the moment it opened - apart from the odd academic spat - the critics were silenced.

The reason? The British Library works rather well. You can summon your books up from the vaults a lot faster than you used to be able to, back in the old British Museum days. It’s a congenial place to sit and study. True, the café there is usuriously expensive, and there have been reports of high-class rumpy-pumpy going on in the luxurious lavatories, but are those the only bad things we can find to say about the place these days?

For all the decades that separate their respective gestations, both Sandy Wilson’s British Library and Michael Hopkins’ Forum in Norwich tell us plenty about the way libraries of all kinds are going. Both are more than just collections of books, there either to study or to borrow. The British Library engages with the public - and includes large public exhibition galleries as well as its inside and outside cafes, in a way that it never did in the old British Museum days. Meanwhile the Forum - East Anglia’s only Millennium project, which replaced a former public library destroyed by fire - exemplifies the trend towards diversification apparent in all new libraries.