The Bermuda College last night formally opened the Brian Burland Centre for Research.The area serves the dual purpose of providing new facilities for the college and honouring the late Bermudian writer.It features a reading room and a climate-controlled vault that holds a collection of Mr Burland’s work which includes numerous unpublished novels, poems and artwork.Mr Burland, who died in 2010, published several acclaimed novels including ‘A Fall From Aloft’, ‘Stephen Decatur, the Devil and the Endymion’, ‘The Flight of the Cavalier’ and ‘The Sailor and the Fox’. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1979.Mr Burland’s daughter Susan, approached the College last year about receiving the collection subject to the conditions of an endowment.“The Brian Burland Centre for Research is the direct result of this endowment,” a College spokeswoman said. “Through the deliberations of a committee set up to make the dream a reality, the idea of constructing a research centre was born.“To satisfy the conditions of the endowment, the Centre has two components — a vault which houses the catalogued papers and artwork, and a reading room where students, scholars and researchers can access the materials.“The reading room, while essentially for study, is also a place that celebrates the pioneering nature of Brian Burland’s work. As part of this, the College commissioned one of Bermuda’s foremost artists, Graham Foster, to paint a mural with the unique idea of one fine artist interpreting the work of another.”