Libraries are more than old books on dusty shelves.
They are places to learn and – as Peter Bailey, director at St. Albert’s Public Library, said – places to bring people together and create a sense of community.
This approach recently won the local library board the 2013 Minister’s Award for Excellence and Innovation in Public Library Service.
The award was presented in recognition of St. Albert’s Readers Festival, STARFest, a two-week event showcasing fiction and non-fiction writers and interviews with authors.
“The idea of libraries being community-led is huge in public libraries this year and there’s a focus on finding the library’s place in the community, what is the future of the library and its role in the future,” Bailey said.
“So with a lot of our programs we try to develop that sense of belonging, sense of being together in public. The reader stuff is really part of that, part of bringing St. Albertans together through topics and books and writers.”
Divided into four categories, the award recognizes libraries for innovative approaches and their contributions to communities across the province.
It is presented annually by the Minister of Municipal Affairs Doug Griffiths at the Alberta Libraries Conference held in Jasper. St. Albert’s library board won in the category of Excellence in a Larger Library.
Bailey said the library applied for the award before and never won. But STARFest – which was first created in 2011 – really reinvented the idea of the community-led event, he said.
“The cool thing I like about this festival is that it’s called a readers’ festival … we put the focus on the reader, on the audience,” said Bailey.
“We invite authors we know our people will like, authors that are popular locally and then we set the events up.”
And STARFest was only the icing on the cake, he said. In 2012, the library offered more than 1,000 programs. More than 950,000 items were loaned and in excess of 330,000 people visited the library.
