We’re coming up to the 90th anniversary of the Vancouver Island Regional Library. In this morning’s interview Beatrix Baxter, the new Circulation Supervisor at the Cortes Island branch, talks about the library, her love of books and how they are going to celebrate on Saturday, May 30th.

Beatrix Baxter:  “The Vancouver Island Regional Library was established in 1936, and it started off with six library branches, 28 sub-branches, and seven van routes. Now we’re up to 39 library branches and our online branch, which we say is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because you can go online anytime.”

“All 39 branches share what we call a floating collection. We all each hold part of the collection. When a library customer goes online to put a book on hold, the call goes out to all the branches that might have a copy of that book. The first one to respond sends the book off, and it goes through our system and ends up here on Cortes, or wherever the person is requesting it from.

“I don’t know how many books we have, but more than five million items are circulated annually. That’s books, magazines, video games, DVDs, TV shows, audiobooks — it’s everything that we have, which is actually quite a lot.”