We’ve heard you loud and clear – you miss the library!
You miss walking into your neighbourhood branch and browsing the shelves, visiting your favourite librarians, and meeting friends. We miss you too and look forward to when we can welcome you into the library again. In the meantime, we are working hard every day to think of ways to continue to serve you. We have been asked many times why we can’t offer curbside service, and the answer is that we have to operate under the guidelines of the province as well as with the guidance of the local public health. However, we have recently been advised that we can mail books and other library items that have been sitting in isolation, as long as you do not return them to the library until we reopen. We have been contacting the patrons who had books waiting at the library for them. It has been truly heartwarming to hear how delighted you are to receive books by mail – especially when we explain that thanks to library book mailing rates, it does not cost the library a lot to send items.
Please be assured that we never charge late fees and will continue to renew the items that you have checked out, so you can keep anything that you have at home until further notice.
We have added a link to our online catalogue back to the library’s website at peclibrary.org. We can only have one library staff member working in the library buildings at a time, so please bear with us if you do not get the speedy service to which you are accustomed. Additionally, because we cannot accept the items we mail out as returns, you may find that your holds list does not move as quickly as usual. You may want to place requests for items that are available rather than those that are checked out to others. We can mail two books at a time. If you need help using the library’s catalogue you can reach us by email at [email protected]. You can also phone (613) 476-5962.
Ebooks and downloadable audiobooks are still available at peclibrary.org, and we add more ebooks every week.
In other literary news, we have been conducting a series of interviews with local authors and sharing them on the library’s website peclibrary.org. We have been asking three questions: What are you reading? What are you writing? And what are you recommending? We have already shared our interviews with Vicki Delany and Peter Blendell, and you can stay tuned for interviews with Laurie Scott, J.D. Carpenter, and Andrew Binks. If you are a local writer or publisher and would like to be included, please connect with me by email ([email protected]). If you’re looking for book suggestions, library staff member Megan Smith has been sharing her book suggestions on our Facebook page (@peclibrary) so find those videos if you want to read something new.
-Liz Zylstra