The end of a Reading Room

It felt like a bit of an anticlimax, in the end.
On Friday last I worked my last couple of hours in the New Bodleian Reading Room, which ceased to be open to readers when the library closed on Saturday. I had expected it to be somehow more of an emotional moment, but the truth is that I am actually looking forward far more than I am looking back.
Ahead are the rest of the changes which will have to take place before the refurbishments are complete: the staff are moving out of the building, starting in the next month, and after we are all gone the crane will move in... I'm quite excited about the crane. I will watch with interest the dismantling of the infrastructure of the New Library as much as I tend to watch building sites with interest (it all comes from spending my 20s in holes in the ground...), all the time getting on with my new duties elsewhere.
Behind... well, seven years (nearly) of working in a building which has undergone many alterations since I began. I have learned a lot, I have worked with some very enjoyable people and some less so, both in terms of readers and colleagues, I have become the proto-librarian I now am through the years that I have been here, but where I work is not as important as the people, and we will all still be around, albeit in different places.
It had felt to me as if the NBRR was being slowly starved as the books were removed, but there is life after. The barcoders are using the space, and periodicals from the Camera and DH are occupying the empty shelves left by the Oriental books. One thing that never stays for long in a library is a flat surface!
So yes, on the whole the future is where I am looking. Not too far, or in too much detail, but forward.