Our libraries have become community development centers of creativity and social engagement. In the past eighteen months alone, the citizens of the Annapolis Valley have contributed over $800,000 toward five library capital projects – expansions, renovations, and purpose built – clearly demonstrating their appreciation for the modern, 21st century public library.
We have been doing some thinking around our region, and we’ve updated our mission and vision for modern library service. Our new mission is “The Annapolis Valley Regional Library builds strong communities through the sharing of places for connections and collections.”
Our Vision is to provide innovative services that contribute to the quality of life, affirm our sense of community, and enhance our spirit of discovery and lifelong learning. In order to achieve this vision, we’ve come up with some strategic directions. These are as follows:
- Provide collections, services, and facilities to enhance the patron experience & increase patron engagement.
- Create a flexible, well-trained organization by building capacity with AVRL Staff
- Governance – Ensure effective oversight of AVRL
- Plan for and provide innovative technologies to optimize library operations & improve the patron’s library experience
- Communicate and celebrate the achievements and value of the AVRL to the community
- Work collaboratively with the Provincial Government, Local Governments, community, and other partners to advance the initiatives of the AVRL
Stay tuned as we work on how we will implement these directions. We will continue to seek ways to remove barriers to service, increase the number of users, provide a variety of programs, and meet the needs of the community through our collections and services. We all want strong communities and successful children, and we believe that the library is a foundation that can help build just that.
As part of this exercise we asked our staff to provide words that best describe our organization. We’ll be asking you, the public, about this, too. Here are the words our staff came up with most often: Welcoming, inviting, community, friendly, helpful, inclusive, fun, free, service, and information. Those words give us a lot to live up to, but we are ready for the challenge to continue to offer the service you expect from us, as well as making our libraries and services more inviting to the whole community.
If you want to see how we’ve done over the past year, you can take a peek at a PDF of our Annual Report. We are proud of a nine percent increase in lending of materials, an increase in Summer Readers, more new users, and more events offered.