October is Canadian Library Month—which is an initiative launched in 2006 by the Canadian Library Association to provide “an opportunity for Canadians not familiar with their local library to come down and experience all the services available to them”—and here at Kimberley Public Library we’re hoping to make ‘getting carded’ with your KPL library card a month-long celebration of supporting our amazing local community!

To be more specific, Kimberley Public Library is teaming up with the Kimberley Chamber of Commerce to get the word out to local businesses about a fun ‘Local Canadian Library Month’ initiative where local residents with a KPL library card can show their card at participating local businesses to obtain a discount during October.

Participating businesses will have signage up with details, as each offer will be unique to the individual businesses… which just means more reasons to visit even more places to see all that your library card can unlock!

Not only do we see this as being a grand excuse for more of us to get out and celebrate (and sample  support) our local community for an entire month of “shoulder season,” but we also hope that this ‘get carded with your local library card’ initiative will be an engaging way to help promote and raise awareness of how having a library card is super cool, extremely useful in ways people often don’t realize — AND — we also want to remind everyone that any local resident (even newborns!) can come down to the Kimberley Public Library and get a library card for FREE.

And once one has a library card, besides being able to get in on the sweet deals that local businesses will be offering up, a whole wide world of access to resources and materials, both physical and digital, becomes available to you. From off the shelves of our cozy Platzl library or brought in from across the province through the BC Interlibrary Connect (or even from the far corners of the internet through services like Libby) — you would be hard-pressed to find another wallet-sized card that comes pre-filled with more potential energy than your local library card!

Because a library card is so much more than a way to borrow books, and a library is so much more than just a place where the borrowable books are kept.

As Neil Gaiman put it so well: “Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.”

So, this October during Canadian Library Month, before you leave the house, make sure you’ve got your Kimberley Public Library card on your person—or make sure you make this the month that you finally get around to getting your FREE local library card—because there’s a very real chance that you might catch a bad case of ‘card envy’ if you start seeing everybody else flashing their KPL cards and getting sweet local deals all over town without you.

Let’s all go get carded!

Kimberley Public Library

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