Edmonton Public Library’s 100th Anniversary: A Century Of Collecting Magic

Edmonton Public Library has a great past and a promising future.

It’s been said that after fire, mankind’s most important inven-tion was language. One can only imagine how much more enjoyable that fire was to sit around when fears, plans and

ideas could finally be shared. Rather than merely stare at the flames, our ancestors now had a portal for the thoughts haunt-ing the inside of their heads. It must have seemed like magic.

Through the millennia, languages and the ideas encapsu-lated by them have been recorded, collected and expanded upon. For centuries, libraries have served as cathedrals to hu-manity’s spiritual, cultural and intellectual journeys.

Linda C. Cook, Edmonton Public Library CEO since 1997, knows that a library is much more than a book museum and

By Mark Kandborg

Spectacular New Jasper Place Library

more than a warehouse where words wait in silence for in-trepid fingers to loosen them from their shelves. She knows the secret, which is a library is not a place where books go to die. It’s where they go to live.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Edmonton Pub-lic Library. “For the past hundred years we’ve been known as a library that has taken risks,” Cook says. “For instance, in 1941 we took an old streetcar and completely reconfigured it and it became North America’s first bookmobile.” That streetcar was eventually replaced by a bus.

It’s hard to overstate the impact that the simple act of bringing books to people had on the lives of many Edmon-tonians. “I remember it being so exciting, and I don’t remem-ber much from elementary,” local spa owner Jillian Kaliel says with a smile. “I was kind of scared of books, but it was fun. You’d go inside and you could choose any one you wanted. You didn’t even have to pay for it.”

As far as innovation goes, the bookmobile was only the beginning for the EPL. “We were the first public library in Canada to automate our catalogue system and our circu-lation system. We were also the first to implement self-service check in and check out of materials,” says Cook, who feels that this single innovation has revolutionized the Edmonton Public Library system. “We knew there was no way we could keep adding staff as our circulation in-creased,” she says. “It just wasn’t sustainable.” Putting the newly simplified check out procedures into members’ hands lightened the staff workload of processing 10.5 mil-lion items a year by roughly 85 per cent, allowing library staff to shift their focus from the mundane to the sublime.

“Rather than waiting for the community to come to us, we can now go out to them.”

The community that Cook is referring to is more than just homes and schools. “Edmonton is such a diverse, multi-cultural city, and as our population increases, that’s going to increase as well.” She points out that there are a lot of new immigrants whose experience in their home countries has not been a positive one when it comes to libraries, which often serve as less-than-embracing arms of the government. “Women in some countries are not allowed to access librar-ies or even to read books. Our community librarians will sometimes physically accompany a group, because they don’t want to come without her or him,” Cook says. “The thing that gets them is they see an array of books that are in their mother language. They see newspapers they can read to find out what’s happening in their home countries in their language. Once they realize that the library has all this won-derful stuff and that they’re welcome, then they come in on their own.”

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Linda C. Cook, Edmonton Public Library CEO

“For the past hundred years we’ve been known

as a library that has taken risks.”

~ Linda C. Cook

more than a warehouse where words wait in silence for in-trepid fingers to loosen them from their shelves. She knows the secret, which is a library is not a place where books go to die. It’s where they go to live.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Edmonton Pub-lic Library. “For the past hundred years we’ve been known as a library that has taken risks,” Cook says. “For instance, in 1941 we took an old streetcar and completely reconfigured it and it became North America’s first bookmobile.” That streetcar was eventually replaced by a bus.

It’s hard to overstate the impact that the simple act of bringing books to people had on the lives of many Edmon-tonians. “I remember it being so exciting, and I don’t remem-ber much from elementary,” local spa owner Jillian Kaliel says with a smile. “I was kind of scared of books, but it was fun. You’d go inside and you could choose any one you wanted. You didn’t even have to pay for it.”

As far as innovation goes, the bookmobile was only the beginning for the EPL. “We were the first public library in Canada to automate our catalogue system and our circu-lation system. We were also the first to implement self-service check in and check out of materials,” says Cook, who feels that this single innovation has revolutionized the Edmonton Public Library system. “We knew there was no way we could keep adding staff as our circulation in-creased,” she says. “It just wasn’t sustainable.” Putting the newly simplified check out procedures into members’ hands lightened the staff workload of processing 10.5 mil-lion items a year by roughly 85 per cent, allowing library staff to shift their focus from the mundane to the sublime.

“Rather than waiting for the community to come to us, we can now go out to them.”

The community that Cook is referring to is more than just homes and schools. “Edmonton is such a diverse, multi-cultural city, and as our population increases, that’s going to increase as well.” She points out that there are a lot of new immigrants whose experience in their home countries has not been a positive one when it comes to libraries, which often serve as less-than-embracing arms of the government. “Women in some countries are not allowed to access librar-ies or even to read books. Our community librarians will sometimes physically accompany a group, because they don’t want to come without her or him,” Cook says. “The thing that gets them is they see an array of books that are in their mother language. They see newspapers they can read to find out what’s happening in their home countries in their language. Once they realize that the library has all this won-derful stuff and that they’re welcome, then they come in on their own.”

2 •

Linda C. Cook, Edmonton Public Library CEO

“For the past hundred years we’ve been known

as a library that has taken risks.”

~ Linda C. Cook

• 3

Liberating staff from mundane tasks not only freed them from the physical bounds of library walls, it freed them from their desks as well. Walk into any branch and you’ll be met by a library staffer who will ask you what they can help you find. You no longer have to find them. The entrance to the Stanley Mil-ner library offers a striking visual representation of this change as form follows function, and in this case, vice versa. Gone are the huge desks which felt like barriers because, quite simply, they were. “Now it’s much more open,” says Cook, for whom access is key. “We’re trying to make the experience barrier-free.”

Now wait a minute, you might be saying. That’s great and all, but let’s talk about the elephant in the stacks. These buildings are full of, there’s no easy way to say this... books. Isn’t that just a bit like increasing access to 8-track tapes? Or stone tablets?

Don’t kid yourselves. These people are in the information business. They’re not about to be left in the dust. They’re cre-ating the dust. “People talk about an information explosion,

MayorStephen Mandel

Ward 1 CouncillorLinda Sloan

Ward 2 CouncillorKim Krushell

Ward 3 Councillor Dave Loken

Ward 4 Councillor Ed Gibbons

Ward 5 CouncillorKaren Leibovici

Ward 6 Councillor Jane Batty

Ward 7 Councillor Tony Caterina

Ward 8 Councillor Ben Henderson

Ward 9 Councillor Bryan Anderson

Ward 10 CouncillorDon Iveson

Ward 12 CouncillorAmarjeet Sohi

Congratulations to the Edmonton Public Library on your 100th Anniversary!

Liberating staff from mundane tasks not only

freed them from the physical bounds of library walls, it

freed them from their desks as well.

Automatic check-out machines

4 •

but that’s not accurate. It’s an information nuclear explosion,” Cook says. So slip on your radiation suits, because that’s what the Edmonton Public Library is providing access to.

Enter Peter Schoenberg, EPL’s Manager of Digital Literacy and Web Services. He’s the tip of the library’s digital spear, and it’s a job he’s taken to like an astronaut to Tang, his en-thusiasm for the task surrounding him like a Tesla arc. You get the picture. There’s simply not the space to do justice to the full spectrum of Schoenberg’s future-centric purview, so we’ll just touch on some highlights.

“Using technology has always been what we do,” Schoen-berg says. “We’ve been online since before people knew that there was an online. The big difference, which has been re-On behalf of the members of Civic Service Union

52, I would like to congratulate the Edmonton Public Library and its staff on its 100th anniversary.

Throughout all these years, EPL has been an essential source of knowledge for the citizens of the City of Edmonton and CSU 52 has always been proud to serve as the Union for most of EPL’s employees.

CSU 52 looks forward to continuing our positive and productive relationship with EPL for the next 100 years.

Lanny ChudykPresident

Peter Schoenberg, EPL’s Manager of Digital Literacy and Web Services.

Congratulations Edmonton Public Library on 100 Years!

www.unitedprotection.com

4 •

but that’s not accurate. It’s an information nuclear explosion,” Cook says. So slip on your radiation suits, because that’s what the Edmonton Public Library is providing access to.

Enter Peter Schoenberg, EPL’s Manager of Digital Literacy and Web Services. He’s the tip of the library’s digital spear, and it’s a job he’s taken to like an astronaut to Tang, his en-thusiasm for the task surrounding him like a Tesla arc. You get the picture. There’s simply not the space to do justice to the full spectrum of Schoenberg’s future-centric purview, so we’ll just touch on some highlights.

“Using technology has always been what we do,” Schoen-berg says. “We’ve been online since before people knew that there was an online. The big difference, which has been re-On behalf of the members of Civic Service Union

52, I would like to congratulate the Edmonton Public Library and its staff on its 100th anniversary.

Throughout all these years, EPL has been an essential source of knowledge for the citizens of the City of Edmonton and CSU 52 has always been proud to serve as the Union for most of EPL’s employees.

CSU 52 looks forward to continuing our positive and productive relationship with EPL for the next 100 years.

Lanny ChudykPresident

Peter Schoenberg, EPL’s Manager of Digital Literacy and Web Services.

Congratulations Edmonton Public Library on 100 Years!

www.unitedprotection.com

• 5

ally accelerating over the past two or three years, is that the actual content is now online. The thing that you’re borrow-ing, listening to, reading or watching is actually a digital ob-ject.” E-books are a perfect example of this, but how exactly do you borrow a virtual object?

“We’re treating digital in the same way that we treat physi-cal,” Schoenberg explains. Just like with a physical book, if they have more than five people waiting for an e-book title, the library buys another copy.

EPL provides e-books across the full range of topics so you can expect to find popular fiction titles as well as non-fiction. We have specialized e-book collections too, such as Safari Books, which provides technical e-books from O’Reilly Media for both consumer and computer programmer audiences. While most e-books can be read from computers, tablets, or smartphones, we also have an eReader lending program for customers just interested in trying out the technology or those who don’t otherwise have access to this type of equip-ment outside the library.

Zinio is a great new product that just went live a few weeks ago,” continues Schoenberg, describing a system which boasts over 270 magazine titles online. “You can download it and read it and get a new issue any time you want.” Basically, you can pay for The Economist online or you can get it for free with your li-brary card. Click. The EPL also has 800 newspapers from around the world available live every morning from 50 countries in 70 languages. “The full issue, not some watered down version that

the site gives you until you pull out your credit card.” Click. How about 270 plays online, including the complete works of Shake-speare for the kid sitting at home at 10 o’clock at night who has to write something on Hamlet? Click. “In terms of digital con-tent, the tipping point has happened for us. We were actually ahead of the curve. We’ve had e-books for a long time, for in-stance, but now the public wants it.”

There’s a sense of forward-looking inertia that you can al-most feel when you walk into the Edmonton Public Library these days; a kind of busy calm in the air. I was planning to conclude this piece by saying something like ‘don’t worry, the Edmonton Public Library’s not going anywhere’, but of course, that’s not true. It has its sights set on a near future sparking with an unfettered stream of information, free of boundaries and full of promise. The EPL, more than ever, seems happy to lead us there.

“We’re at a really good spot right now,” Linda Cook says, with the smile of someone who’s clearly as invested in the future as she is proud of the past. “It’s a perfect time for us to sort of spread our wings.”

Karen L Hollohan Manager, CIBC Commercial Banking 10102 Jasper Avenue, Edmonton AB T5J 1W5 PH: 780 420 3042 • Fax: 780 426 7320

Congratulations Edmonton Public Library on 100 Years!We are proud to be a partner in your success.

(780) 496-7047 • www.epl.ca

Just like with a physical book, if they have more than five people waiting for an e-book title, the library buys another copy. With

the electronic version, however, the process is far more efficient.

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