Yesterday my Dad and I visited my favourite place in the city – the downtown library! Ten years ago the library underwent a major renovation and expansion, becoming the anchor of downtown it is today. The birthday celebration included stroy-telling and music in the children’s area, a naming ceremony for the Aboriginal areas, a writers-in-residence reunion, and a Maker Faire.
The Maker Faire featured ten stations for “creating, experimenting and collaborating” throughout the library. At one station I played piano notes via celery sticks using a Makey Makey (“An invention kit for the 21st century. Turn everyday objects into touch pads and combine them with the Internet.” – there’s a Christmas gift idea!). Other stations included button making, squishy circuits (creating electronics via PlayDoh), and Arduino programming. My dad was impressed by all the cool things you can do in a library nowadays. He realized libraries can still thrive today when they’re less about books and more about information. Even I was impressed – while I’d learnt a bit about Maker Spaces and interactivity in my BA practicum, I’d never heard of a lot of the science projects they had on hand.
Recently, the Local History room moved and expanded into a large space on the fourth floor (home to non-fiction and my favourite places to read quietly). Dad and I spent sometime browsing intriguing books and ephemera about the city. He found newspaper clippings about when his company changed his name. I flipped through huge tomes of directories, looking for my parents and grandparents. These directories, printed until 1999, strove to contain the name, address, occupation and marital status of every adult living in the city. I tracked my grandparent’s addresses and places of work, browsing the directories from a number of years including 1968 and 1997. I also flipped through the Municipal Manuals, a tiny booklet published from 1907 to 2007 containing facts and figures about the city. Certainly you could spend a day in that room experiencing bits of your city’s own history you never knew about!
Of course, we browsed lots of books as well. Dad and I both picked up a few books from the New and Noted section. The top three books are Dad’s; the bottom four are mine (I signed out three books I didn’t plan to read this year, even after resisting four books and instead adding them to my TBR).
Have you visited your local library? Did you discover anything new?
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