New director for Chinook Regional Library
A new face welcomed delegates to the Chinook Regional Library’s annual general meeting in Swift Current.
Kathryn Foley has been the director of the Chinook Regional Library since February. She attended her first annual general meeting, April 13.
She grew up in British Columbia and her lifelong passion for libraries started at a young age. She became her school’s first junior librarian when she was 11 years old.
“My first degree was as a teacher librarian,” she told the Prairie Post after the meeting. “I worked in that field for over 10 years straight, and then I substitute taught from kindergarten to Grade 12. I also have been in a classroom for two years, but my heart was definitely always in library.”
She decided to continue her studies and completed a Master of Library and Information Science at the University of British Columbia in 2004. Since then she has gained extensive experience in various roles in different library systems.
She worked as a youth services librarian in the Okanagan Regional Library in Kelowna, and then moved to Idaho to become the head of youth services at the Meridian Library.
“There I built a department from two full-time and three part-time to five fulltime and three part-time over three and a half years,” she said. “I really enjoyed that. … It was a chance to really get to spread my wings a bit and work with people and get used to managing others.”
She then returned to Canada to work as head librarian in Cochrane, Alberta. Thereafter she was the library director of the Trail and District Public Library in British Columbia for four years.
“There I helped built a LAMI – a library, archive, museum and information centre – right on the Columbia River. So that was beautiful and I got to open it and built a team, and then I was ready for another challenge and came to Saskatchewan.”
Foley heard about the available director position at the Chinook Regional Library when she was used as a reference by a former library colleague who is living in southwest Saskatchewan, and she decided to apply.
“It’s about fitting into a community, and I prefer a smaller city and a rural setting,” she said. “I like rural people. I like their we-can-do-it-together kind of attitude. It gets in some ways easier and in some ways harder to keep moving, but I like the prairies. I found something interesting and wonderful about everywhere we’ve lived, but I’m really enjoying Swift Current and especially going out into my rural communities. I find that fascinating and a really enjoyable part of my life.”
One of her first goals in her position as director is to visit every library within the large area covered by the Chinook Regional Library. She has already visited 13 of the 31 libraries in a period of seven weeks.
She believes effective communication within the organization will be important to provide good service to all library users.
“I think having everybody working together and pulling for the good of everybody will always be a challenge, because we forget at times that we’re in this for everybody,” she said. “We tend to pull for our particular community strongly, and sometimes that’s against what’s good for everybody. It’s just realizing what libraries stand for and the vision of libraries is to help everybody.”
She is aware of the public support for public libraries two years ago in Saskatchewan that convinced the provincial government not to proceed with a major funding cut to regional libraries.
“That to me is really satisfying,” she said. “It was in part what encouraged me to come here, that the people are really behind us. They see the good in having libraries. They recognize that we are trying to support and help people from every walk of life, manage to be engaged with one another; to be engaged with knowledge, to have lifelong learning available to them.”
The Chinook Regional Library’s former director, Dr. Jean McKendry, has retired, but she is still employed by the organization for an interim period until the vacant position of rural branch manager has been filled.
She joined the Chinook Regional Library in September 2014 as rural branch manager and became director in 2016. The provincial government’s decision in 2017 to restore funding to Chinook Regional Library was one of the most memorable moments of her time as director.
“That gave us hope that we would continue at least for a year, but then we were worried that the 2018 budget may have further cuts,” she said. “We got the same funding that we had the previous year and then this year we actually got $20,000 more funding than we did last year.”
Circulation of library materials increased from 298,000 in 2017 to 305,917 in 2018. According to Dr. McKendry the different libraries have some really good programs.
“We could do with bigger libraries out in our rural branches and when a community like Burstall and Hazlet have the opportunity to move to a larger space, they took full advantage of it,” she said. “The community was very supportive, but where we got a setback was with SaskTel hooking up the equipment. In Hazlet they wanted $8,500 to move the equipment across the road and Burstall the same thing, but they want $11,750 for the internet connection. We've done temporary hookups, but we haven't resolved the other issues.”
She considered it essential that internet bandwidth for rural libraries need to increase to provide an effective service to library users.
“We can't function without the internet in our modern society,” she said. “So why should rural communities only have three megabytes per second bandwidth. It's not enough for anybody.”
A personal highlight for Dr. McKendry from her time as director was the outreach efforts in rural libraries to their communities.
“I thought it was an essential part of my job to go out to the branches,” she said. “So I started going out to the branches and attending board meetings and encouraging communities to do more programs and our circulating has gone up and there's new programs all the time starting in the branches.”