On a cold Saturday morning last February I sat in the Picton Public Library, keeping an eye on my three kids in the stacks.

I observed librarian Adam Cavanaugh and his customers.

He went out of his way to greet people, usually by name. He checked in with a high school student about his homework. With practiced poise and compassion, he engaged no fewer than three homeless people in the space of an hour. They were coming in just to warm up. He knew their names. He listened to stories perhaps not entirely grounded in reality, without confirming or denying. He kept any advice low-key and indirect. He finished with, “you’re always welcome here.”

The library is one of the last truly public, community spaces. It is open five days a week to anyone, without a single requirement for admission. In a quietly declining civic culture not only increasingly privatized, but, more and more relegated, for good and ill, to commenting pages on Facebook, the public library system across Canada is suddenly in the spotlight. It combines the functions of church, community centre, school, town hall, and coffee shop, for nothing. Every service the library provides, from making computers available to digital literacy lessons to writers’ workshops, is free, and open to every member of the public.

Last year, the library welcomed 10,700 users, from children and youth to seniors. That’s almost half the population of the county.

Mr. Cavanaugh is an IT support member of the public library team. He holds an M.A. in Library and Information Science. His immediate role is “to reduce barriers to access to digital information,” a cornerstone of the philosophy of the library as a whole, which is to reduce barriers in all realms. The library is about its community, and it advocates for those on the edges. “Universal access” is its goal—not only to information, be it digital or printed, but to the means of life, which includes the very space and shelter it occupies. “A public library needs to be malleable in its response to public needs,” and, for some, this includes the need for a “temperature-controlled safe space,” says Mr. Cavanaugh.

While the idea of the public library is abstractly inclusive, it always comes down to the people who actually work there to put it into action. Mr. Cavanaugh describes his co-workers as supportive of each other as well as their patrons. Conversations about changing dynamics and the needs of visitors lead to spontaneous responses as well as new programs.

One of these is the public pantry established this summer. Jennifer Kingma, its organizer, says that the idea came from several sources, a course she was taking with the Ontario Library Service, witnessing a “community fridge” arrangement at another town’s hockey arena, and, most of all, the obvious need of many of the patrons at our own library.

Beginning with staff donations, and then, upon seeing the uptake in the community, reaching out to partner with other charitable organizations and sponsoring businesses, the pantry has become the newest way in which the library does what libraries have always done: sharing.

Ms. Kingma, whose official job at the library is Interlibrary Loan Processing, never expected to be running a pantry, but finds that it is really just an expansion of her work and the library’s mission. Her satisfaction in finding the right sources to answer a patron’s questions easily turns to satisfying needs for things other than information. She is even able to use the PEC interlibrary loans courier system to send pantry items to other branches if their patrons cannot make it to  Picton.

All of this points to the integration of an institutional system that is run by humane and caring individuals. Library CEO Barbara Sweet suggests that, as much amalgamation in the late 1990s was a sore point for many across the province, it was a positive for libraries. As one system, the County of Prince Edward Library is the same at every branch, its catalogue a “floating collection,” readily available to all.

At the same time, it’s the staff on the floor who make each library come to life. Every librarian I spoke to was enthused about their colleagues, and noted how willing they are to help both patrons and each other. It is the library staff who note needs and find ways to meet them.

How are librarians trained for this expanded conception of the library as public space? Mr. Cavanaugh notes that although his library degree may have mentioned the social-work aspects of the job, “I was actually more prepared for this by working as a bartender.” Like any good bartender, a librarian will make sure you know you’re welcome, and keep an eye out for you.

Liz Zylstra, the library’s Communications and Outreach officer, and a regular contributor to the Picton Gazette, points out that the contemporary library is not the clichéd “ivory tower” run by rule-bound school-marms. The PEC Library was among the first to do away with late fees, for example. The threat of fees was creating an obstacle to using library materials. As Mr. Cavanaugh notes, the “honour system”  invites everyone to feel they are a stakeholder.

One of the library mandates is for innovation, adds Ms. Zylstra. The library wants to be seen as welcoming, not forbidding. “Not everyone is a reader, but we are here for everyone. Our staff is interactive with patrons: we listen a lot.”

“We have the advantage of offering something for nothing,” added Ms. Sweet. The library’s requirement for issuing a borrowing card is “live, work or play” in the County, no more and no less.