5 reasons my library ‘gets’ me.

I was recently reminded why I hap­pily sup­port my loc­al lib­rary, and yes, this is all about me. The back­story: A friend recom­men­ded a few movies over din­ner the oth­er even­ing. The loc­al video store did­n’t have them, so after remem­ber­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with anoth­er friend, I went to the loc­al lib­rary, from the com­fort of…


I was recently reminded why I hap­pily sup­port my loc­al lib­rary, and yes, this is all about me.

The back­story: A friend recom­men­ded a few movies over din­ner the oth­er even­ing. The loc­al video store did­n’t have them, so after remem­ber­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with anoth­er friend, I went to the loc­al lib­rary, from the com­fort of my desktop.

After a brief cata­logue search, all my movies were placed on hold to be delivered to the branch near work when they’re ready to be picked up.

Ãœber con­veni­ent, and since this is all about me here’s 5 sol­id reas­ons my lib­rary is convenient:

  1. Hard to find books, CDs and DVDs — In my exper­i­ence, lib­rar­ies will tend to have more var­ied selec­tion, not being driv­en by the need to sell more units of the pop­u­lar stuff, they can have one or two cop­ies of more eclect­ic works.
  2. Live stream­ing and down­load­able music — this one sur­prised me. The Edmon­ton Pub­lic Lib­rary has the Naxos music cata­logue avail­able for stream­ing, as well as time-lim­ited down­loads of of eAu­diobooks Over­drive (Win­dows Media only (boo!) a ser­vice I’ve not used, yet).
  3. Online cata­logue with reser­va­tion sys­tem — I can reserve books when it’s con­veni­ent for me, say, at 2am.
  4. Mod­est price, huge bene­fits — Lib­rary fees are inex­pens­ive. Their value to me, and to my com­munity are huge. My lib­rary has pro­gram­ming for kids, annu­al book sales, is a great meet­ing place, and is an awe­some resource.
  5. The Edmon­ton Pub­lic Lib­rary gets social media — Heck, how many stodgy old places do you know that devel­op their own Face­book Applic­a­tion?

Photo courtesy Nrbelex


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2 responses to “5 reasons my library ‘gets’ me.”

  1. Jane Starr Avatar
    Jane Starr

    Yes, EPL rocks. I have a con­stant request list of books, audio books (the bees knees when you are driv­ing or cook­ing or doing some­thing else when you can­’t read a print book), and dvds. I see some­thing that catches my interest, put in a request and wait for the email to tell me it’s wait­ing. Very handy. I buy lots of books, but I often read them from the lib­rary first — either because they’re first out in hard­back and I don’t want to wait until I can buy the paper­back, or because I am not sure I want to own the item at all. The lib­rary has saved me tons of money on stuff that really was­n’t worth the pur­chase — far more than the cost of my annu­al mem­ber­ship. By the way, if you buy 3 years mem­ber­ship at a time you get a discount.

  2. Brad Grier Avatar

    Jane! Cool point re: the dis­count. I was­n’t aware of that…but yeah, we do value our library.

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