Athabasca County Library Board
3602 – 48th Avenue
Athabasca, AB. T9S 1M8
January 26, 2014

A Brief to the Royal Society of Canada’s Expert Panel on The Status and Future of
Canada's Libraries and Archives
I am writing as Chair of the Board of the Athabasca County Library Board in Northern Alberta.
The Board runs 3 school based public libraries in hamlets in Athabasca County. They are in
Wandering River, Grassland, and Rochester. As well, we provide library service to county
residents through service agreements with the municipal libraries in the Village of Boyle and
the Town of Athabasca. The comments below correspond to the framing questions that were
posed by the Panel.
Services
1. Our libraries provide library service to residents of Athabasca County. This includes natives
and new Canadians as well as people from many ethnic backgrounds. Canadians as a whole
get very good library service from the public, school, academic, and special libraries in
Canada. While the services vary from library to library, most provide recreational reading,
reference or information services as well as access to online databases and services. As
well, many libraries provide meeting places for community groups and programs for their
patrons that enhance their knowledge and skills. For the most part, these are of good
quality. There is a great emphasis on working to develop literacy skills and other skills that
will help people manage in society.
Archives are less well known by Canadians, but they are aware that they exist. I don’t think
that some people know that they can access archives for their own research.
2. Libraries have embraced whatever technology is in use at the time. As a result, we have
some material that is in formats that are hard to use or people can’t use as they don’t have
the machines to use them. In past 20 years technology has changed immensely. Libraries
have been chronically underfunded and have struggled to embrace the many changes.
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They have managed to do so fairly well. What they haven’t been able to do is to take older
material in one format and change it to one that is useable by current technology. The best
example of this is the number of videocassettes and cassette tapes and records that are in
libraries. Most public libraries do not have facilities or staff to get them converted to digital
format or even to CDs or store them on a streaming server. There needs to be much
cooperation and a huge increase in training and funding for this to happen.
3. We don’t measure the outcome of our services. We record data about what we do, but we
don’t know what the impact is of the use of the services by our users. We sometimes ask
for uses for their opinions about our services, but we don’t have any effective way of
measuring the impact of the service. We know that people like our service and feel that we
offer valuable services to them. They keep using them and keep telling us how much they
like our services. Use of the libraries continues to increase.
Community Outreach and Awareness
1. In our county, people definitely know that the public libraries are there and they are very
supportive of our libraries. About a year and a half ago we had community meetings about
how the library could meet community needs. These were well attended by a good cross
section of the community. Out of the meetings came a Plan of Service for each of the 3
libraries in the County. This has been shared with attendees and the general community.
There is definite feeling in each community that the library serves a valuable and important
role in the community. Our users know that we are part of the larger library community as
they often request books through the library system and get material from other libraries in
the system or from other places.
2. The libraries in Athabasca County provide a variety of services to users including:
recreational reading, interlibrary loan, access to a variety of databases (provided by
Northern Lights Library System and The Alberta Library), reference and information, story
time for young children, author readings, informational programs, access to government
information, access to computers and the Internet, photocopying, and access to print
magazines. Our library system is a consortial service that is supported by 4 of the regional
library systems in Alberta. We count the usage of most services, but we don’t have any way
of measuring the impact that service has on people. Often users will make informal
comments about a service or program, but this interaction is not captured in a formal
manner. The library staff do regular evaluations of the goals that are in our Plan of Service
and make changes to services as needed. We do patron surveys to ask them what they
think of the services we provide, but not on the impact of the service. In general, our users
are very satisfied with the services that we provide.
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3. In the digital era, patrons may need to have help with using online services such as how to
search databases, how to search and use the library catalogue, or access and use audio
books. We need to assist users with whatever they are doing as they request it. Libraries
should be a place where people can find information that they need especially in online
format. In the school based public libraries that the Athabasca County Library Board runs,
the library managers provide students with information on how to use the Internet and
teach basic information literacy skills. This is very important as children need to develop
good quality information seeking and analysis skills so that they can navigate the vast array
of online resources as easily as possible.
4. Libraries can be a place for people to learn together by attending programs. They provide
informal spaces where users share what they are reading or doing and just share time
together. These activities build communities. Library systems are providing options for the
sharing of reviews of materials which helps others decide which books they want to read.
The library is the place to house collective memory as they have many books, older issues of
magazines or newspapers and other materials that aren’t available anywhere else. The
collection is maintained and catalogued so that it is easily accessible. It is vital that this
material remain available to people as new users often want to go back to the original
books or articles that were written many years previously. This is a vital role of libraries.

New Directions
Digitization
1. “Born-digital” material has many challenges for small libraries. First is to even know that it
exists and then figuring how to access it if one even knows of its existence. Then one has to
determine whether it is of reasonable and reliable quality. Then there is the challenge of
letting users know that it exists and helping them access it.
2. The “brick-and-mortar library” will always be with us in our opinion. It will always be a
place to go to find material, interact with others, access information for some, get
assistance with finding information, or just sit and read. The paper book or magazine is still
the most easily portable source for reading. One doesn’t need any special equipment to
use it and you can use them anywhere as long as there is light to read by! They need to be
stored in a readily accessible location and we won’t ever have everything digitized or online
or in a format that everyone can use that way.

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Education
1. I don’t have an answer for this question.
2. I think that library school professors and instructors need to come to small, rural libraries
and see how they operate. Then they will be able to determine what competencies their
students will need in order to work in them. They also need to help students learn to be
advocates for libraries and their users. The conversation hasn’t started very much at all
from what I can tell. While the same type of activity happens in many public libraries, there
are unique challenges that rural librarians and library boards face that it would be good to
study and document.
Resources
1. In Alberta there are already a consortia and library systems that have been formed to assist
with the support the technological needs of public libraries. Athabasca County is a member
of Northern Lights Library System which is a member of the Alberta Library. NLLS is one of
seven public library systems in Alberta. There are staff at the system office who are
dedicated to dealing with and supporting technology in the libraries. We benefit greatly
from the knowledge and skills of these people. We couldn’t manage to operate in the
complex world of library technology without their support. They do many things including
servicing equipment and fixing problems to doing censorial purchasing of equipment that is
then set up the same way. All the libraries have wireless internet available to users and
web sites. Neither of these would be possible without the work of the library system staff.
It is unfortunate that the Government of Alberta has chosen to stop funding the Alberta
Public Library Electronic Network (APLEN). This organization operated as a part of The
Alberta Library (TAL) and provided good support for the systems and to larger public
libraries in support of technology in public libraries. The work that APLEN did is supposed to
be taken on by the Public Library Services Branch, but to date, very little seem to have
happened and what has been done is not funded enough to do any good from what we can
see.
2. Not applicable to public libraries
3. The library budget of our public library board would have to at least double if not triple so
that we could provide the quality of library service to our patrons that we only dream about
now. We need to have full time staff working for the public library. Currently the library
managers receive a small honorarium for the amount of time that they send doing public
library work. In one case, the library manager is provided by the school division. We should
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be open many more hours than we are. We need to have more time to provide programs
and space to provide programs.
Given adequate financial resources, in 2017, our full time staff would provide: evening and
weekend hours on more days as determined in consultation with our users. There would be
a wide variety of current material, frequent varied programs for a range of users, and a
summer reading program for the whole summer staffed by a student and supported by
regular staff. The libraries would be full of people using the Internet or using other
resources on our computers or reading the newest issues of their favorite magazines and
newspapers and reading a variety of material in the library. Our online services would be
very busy.
Thank you for the opportunity to share our comments about the state of Canada’s libraries and
archives as well as how this applies to our situation in Athabasca County.
Respectfully submitted,

Doug Kariel
Chair

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