Coming Soon_ The Library's 90th Anniversary

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - We're coming up to the 90th anniversary of the Vancouver Island Regional Library. In this morning's interview Beatrix Baxter, the new Circulation Supervisor at the Cortes Island branch, talks about the library, her love of books and how they are going to celebrate on Saturday, May 30th. Beatrix Baxter:  “The Vancouver Island Regional Library was established in 1936, and it started off with six library branches, 28 sub-branches, and seven van routes. Now we’re up to 39 library branches and our online branch, which we say is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because you can go online anytime." “All 39 branches share what we call a floating collection. We all each hold part of the collection. When a library customer goes online to put a book on hold, the call goes out to all the branches that might have a copy of that book. The first one to respond sends the book off, and it goes through our system and ends up here on Cortes, or wherever the person is requesting it from. “I don’t know how many books we have, but more than five million items are circulated annually. That’s books, magazines, video games, DVDs, TV shows, audiobooks — it’s everything that we have, which is actually quite a lot.” Origins of the Cortes Island Library Narrator: The first Cortes Islands Library is actually one year older than the Vancouver Island Regional Library. Beatrix Baxter: "The first library that Cortes had was started by the Whaletown Women's Institute in 1935. They were gifted or negotiated the use of the Farmers Institute building, which we now know as the Louise Tucker Library. That's our longest running library. The Whaletown School had a library at some point." "When Manson's Hall underwent a major renovation in 1980, they expanded it to include the space for the post office and the play school and the library. So we were up in the top floor of Manson's Hall for many years." Cortes Island Joins the Vancouver Island Regional Library System "May Ellingsen ran things over there before the museum was established. She used to keep all of her famous photo albums at the library. I don't know when it became part of the Vancouver Island Regional Library, but she was instrumental in making that happen." “In 2009–2010, a structural engineering assessment of the building found that it was no longer safe to house the weight of the books in that room. There were simply too many books. There was a lot of community engagement at the time. A lot of people were really concerned that we weren’t going to have a library.”" The Move to Linnaea “They were looking for a new location for at least a couple of years, and in 2012 they made a new arrangement with Linnaea to use the space that had been the former Linnaea school. The building was renovated, and by November 2013 the library had moved into the new space and was open to the public again. “We added a self-checkout machine, which made lineups shorter — one of the concerns residents had about the old location. We’ve also gotten more hours over the years, which is great. We changed our hours in September, adding an extra evening and another daytime shift, so you’re more likely to be able to drop by and find that the library is open.” Narrator: Jude Marentette was the circulation supervisor when the library moved from Manson’s Hall to its present location in the Linnaea Education Centre, but she retired last fall. Beatrix has been the librarian since December 2025.