Arlene Kissau laughs as she recalls a day of horror from the history of St. Albert's library.
December 1983: the St. Albert Public Library had just moved into St. Albert Place, says Kissau, and was preparing for a visit from Joe Forsyth, Alberta's director of library services. "All of a sudden, all the fire alarms in the buildings go off." A pipe had burst on the second floor, sending a torrent of water down to the first floor and into the library.
"It was mass pandemonium," she says. With the director's visit just hours away, Kissau and the rest of the staff had to scramble to get the books to safety, all while wading ankle-deep in water. "We had books all over the top shelves!"
Kissau ran the children's section at the library from 1981 to 2007, making her witness to more than half the library's history in St. Albert. The library celebrates its 50th anniversary on June 28.
The library picked June 28 as its birthday to commemorate the passage of St. Albert's library bylaw on that day in 1961, says Peter Bailey, the library's director. "We weren't all that big, but neither was St. Albert."
There will be free cake at the library all day in celebration, as well as a large banner on which people can write their library memories.
Books on the move
St. Albert's first library actually opened in the 1930s, Bailey notes, when Suzie Atkinson started borrowing forklift-loads of books from the University of Alberta and loaning them out from her Essex car.
By 1946, Atkinson had joined the town's Women's Institute and rallied its members to create a permanent library. After rustling up some books, St. Albert's library opened its doors at the farm produce office on Piron (now Perron) Street across from the community hall. Residents could borrow books for up to two weeks from librarian Molly Laderoute, according to the Black Robe's Vision, and fork over five cents a week for overdue books.
The library bounced around town over the next few decades, Bailey notes, touching down at a butcher's shop, a shoemaker's, the community hall, a lumber store and the old town hall on Glenview Crescent. It finally got its own building — the Centennial Library — in 1967.
When the province decided to build the Provincial Building on their spot in 1982, the library moved yet again, this time to Fairview Boulevard where Grandma Gooch Day Care is today. "The community was growing very quickly," Kissau says, and so was the collection. It was at Fairview that she and the staff came up with the library's first reading game, Readopoly.
The library moved to its current home in St. Albert Place in 1983 — a place with eight times more storage space. "That was phenomenal," Kissau says, although it was tricky lining up the shelves due to the curvy walls.
Computers were still rare in those days, Kissau says. "Everything was done manually," she recalls, with books sorted with stamps and punch cards. Patrons could try out their tech skills on Apple IIe computers, and, by 1987, look up books through the Dynix Automation System.
A future for books
Today, the library has an expansive website and a collection that includes everything from video games to e-books, Bailey says. "We've always been a popular materials library," he says, so they've brought in new media in response to demand. The bulk of their collection is still books.
Bailey predicts the library will become more of a gathering place in the future as physical books become less commonplace, while librarians will serve as guides to the mass of information now available through the Internet. "The classic question still remains: can you recommend a good book?"
Pam Forsyth, who directed the library from 1980 to 2010, says she hopes a new building is in the library's future. "It's been too small for more than a decade," she notes, and they've been getting rid of books to make way for new ones.
The best thing about the library for Kissau is the enthusiasm kids show when they hook up with a good book. "You see the spark [when] they loved a particular title."
