Kirsty – North Shore

“I didn’t grow up in Auckland. I grew up on a farm about an hour’s drive north of here on the shores of the Kaipara Harbour, a really small community.

The first school I went to there were only 12 kids, so a little country school. I moved to the city to go to university in the late ‘70s, and I’ve lived here in various parts of Auckland ever since, but mostly on the North Shore.

I guess I feel proud of the people I work with, because we’ve had a lot of change in our organisation just recently and they’ve coped really well with it and have had a really positive attitude and it’s been a real testament, I think, to the way that my team work together; that they are that resilient. So that would be something I’m proud of, yeah.

They’re committed to the kind of work that they do, which is really community-based, and because they’re able to see the importance of that work and their relationship to it. I work just behind here at Takapuna Library, and I look after the local history and photograph collections. We work with people who have an interest in heritage on the North Shore and in the Rodney area, and community archives of history, that kind of thing.

I’ve often heard them [libraries] described as the community’s living room, and I think that’s very true. We have a wide diversity of people who use libraries; young mums with kids who come in partly for social connection. You often see the mothers gathering together outside and going to coffee shops afterwards, and I think that’s really important for them to be able to connect with one another when they’re at home with little kids.

Also, it’s good for little kids themselves to get to understand that libraries are places where they get help, they get books, they get stories. We also see lots of high school kids. Lots of the local kids come here for study on the late nights and weekends. So we’re often busy, particularly around school assignment time with the students.

We have a strong community of older people who use us for the books that we have. It’s also been quite a focus for local immigrant communities too, as that starts to build and change. We’ve got strong language collections. We’ve also got a small homeless community who use us regularly, and they’ve been very much part of the library family for years. So they’re in and out daily and I think if libraries didn’t exist in the community you’d lose an important community hub.

We’ve lost a lot of other things in communities over the years, particularly in the countryside where you don’t have Post Offices. They used to be a strong focus for communities, local stores, that kind of thing, and as communities get smaller and more global, because of the internet, you start losing those kind of services. So I think communities that have got libraries in them have still got a centre.

How can we improve Auckland’s humanity?

I guess continuing to be open in my job and being tolerant of difference. Making sure that you don’t make snap judgements about people just based on your initial impressions of them, which is something we all do. Finding room for empathy and compassion I guess for people who live different kinds of lives to the life I choose to live.”

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