Starting Jan. 2, St. Albert Public Library is revamping its membership fee structure. Gone will be the household memberships, replaced with individual memberships. The cost of membership will also change as a result.
Originally introduced in 1984, library director Peter Bailey said St. Albert is one of the only municipalities he knows of in Alberta that charges memberships in that way.
"Maybe it was normal (in 1982) to go that way. Every single person was a member of a nuclear family with a mom, dad and two kids and that was not a big deal, but things have changed over the decades, and there's a different makeup of families," Bailey said.
Changing family structures, however, aren't the driving force behind moving to individual memberships. Fort Saskatchewan, Strathcona County, Edmonton and St. Albert are looking at making their library catalogues more accessible to residents of the Edmonton metropolitan area. For St. Albert to participate, it had to change its fee structure.
"So to do that, we did need to have a membership structure that's the same as all our pals," Bailey said.
Starting Jan. 2, people will pay for memberships as individuals, rather than as a household. The first adult will pay $20, but any other adults in the house will pay $10. Children under 18 will still get their memberships for free. The house maximum is $30.
For seniors, the first membership is $15 and the second is $5.
Under the existing and soon-to-be replaced system, a household paid $30 for a membership, which anyone at that address could use.
"We're hoping people will go that direction but we know a number will still go with one card," Bailey said.
The change will mean a loss of revenue for the library for 2013 as Bailey and the library board anticipate not every household member with a card will ante up for an individual membership. Bailey did point out the fees are still "70 per cent" higher than in Edmonton, which charges $12 annually.
Library members won't have to do anything on Jan. 2 — in fact staff will still be selling and taking household memberships until the end of the month. It will be when memberships expire that members will have to change over.
There won't be many changes otherwise, Bailey said. Dad can still use his card to check out Junior's Dr. Seuss books and his wife's Harlequins, but only if he has the card. Gone will be the days when people of one household could show up without a card and simply asked it be withdrawn on the account of someone they live with.
"It's a lot better privacy-wise," Bailey said. "But it'll be something new to some people who are used to doing that."
Sortation unit
The library's new toy will likely be up and running by the end of the month.
The long-anticipated $200,000 sortation unit, which will automatically sort returned materials for shelving, has been delivered to the library and will likely be up and running by the end of the month.
Project director Kathleen Troppmann is hoping staff will start training on the new unit by the end of the week.
"If everything goes well, it should be running by next week," Troppmann said. "It's a bit challenging with the Christmas holidays."
Approved in the 2012 budget, the unit reads small silicon Radio Frequency Identification tags that have been inserted into all materials. The information contained on the tag tells the machine into which bin to place an item.
