From cover to cover

BY RHONDA MARKBY

Linda Hughes has always taken her work home – happily. This week she retired as Timaru district librarian after 25 years. There will be no more work but, as she told staff reporter Rhonda Markby, books will still be an important part of her life.

It's hardly surprising that Linda Hughes ended up as a librarian. As a little girl, she she was such an avid reader that she used to read the backs of cornflake packets.

Yet her rural Canadian home wasn't filled with books. Magazines and newspapers were plentiful, but books were an expensive luxury, and the family farm was too far from town to go to the local library.

What she did have were intelligent parents who valued education, and a grandmother who told her to always practise her reading – even if it was the back of a cereal box.

Only a few years ago, she learned that one of her early teachers still remembers her as the best reader she ever taught.

The highlight of those early school years was the arrival every few months of the metal book boxes from Canada's equivalent of the Ministry of Education.

"I would read my way through the box from end to end and back again," she recalls.

For the woman who has been the Timaru City and then the Timaru District librarian for a quarter of a century, there is no doubting her enthusiasm for books. She is one person who happily takes her "work" home, always reading in bed at night.

Ask what she has read recently and her face lights up. She gives a precis of her latest read, and adds half a dozen other titles you might be interested in.

Yet, in spite of her love of books, she never set out to be a librarian.

Like her three sisters, she went to university. Although she graduated with a BA in social sciences, she never really used it. Love got in the way.

She had not long finished university and was working at the Banff Springs Hotel when she met New Zealander George Hughes. He was working there on a stopover on his way to Britain. They married, and she returned to New Zealand with him.

While living in Palmerston North in the early 1970s, she applied for a job at the Massey University library, got it, and did her library training extramurally. Promotion followed until she found herself head of circulation – probably a university library's closest equivalent to head librarian.

With many of her husband's family living in the South Island, Linda decided to apply for the Timaru city librarian's position. She doubted she would get it but thought that, if nothing else, it would be good job interview practice.

She remembers well her interview in the old council committee room and the number of people there – the mayor, the assistant town clerk and all the councillors on the committee that oversaw the library.

Just as memorable was realising that the jacket she was wearing was of the same tweed fabric as the upholstery on the room's chairs.

"I didn't know I would fit in so well," she quipped, breaking the ice, and obviously going on to impress the panel.

Coming from a university library crammed with reference books, she was a little uneasy when she first saw the small size of Timaru's reference section, wondering how she would ever answer all those questions the public invariably ask a librarian. She mentioned it to a colleague, who assured her that she needed only three reference books: a dictionary, an electoral roll and a telephone book – the latter to be used to call someone who knew the answer.

Linda arrived in town to take up work in the five-year-old Warren and Mahoney-designed building. She says she has always found it good to work in, and believes it has held its age very well.

The library has very much evolved over the past 25 years. Amalgamation of the Temuka and Geraldine borough, Strathallan county and Timaru City councils in 1989 meant the city librarian became the district librarian, taking on two more libraries and seven or eight link libraries (libraries usually in public halls).

She remembers going to a meeting of the Waitohi hall committee to discuss its library. The committee members were all male, but there was no doubt that it was their wives who had supplied the country-style morning tea.

The link libraries progressively closed, leaving only Woodbury still operating.

In spite of the technology changes that have come about, Linda has no doubt that books and libraries will survive.

She points to the fact that the Timaru library was issuing just under 400,000 books a year when she arrived, and that figure is now close to one million district-wide.

She doesn't see the internet as a threat to libraries, because there are always doubts about the accuracy of information online, whereas books go through an extensive editing and correcting process before they are published.

The fact that some of the 388,000 visits made to the Timaru library each year are by people who never intend to take out a book doesn't worry her in the least. Some come in to use the internet; others simply use the library as a reading room to check out the latest newspapers, or as a place to meet friends.

To her, a library should be a meeting place, a neutral place, a place where people can feel quite at home.

Aoraki Polytechnic used to hold its computer classes there. People found it a non-threatening environment because it was not an institution, Linda says.

For others, it is a place for their weekly game of Trivial Pursuit or to take part in a book club meeting.

When it comes to what people read, some things change, while others don't.

Books on the British royal family were huge when Linda arrived in Timaru. These days, they're not. What remains as popular as ever are DIY books and New Zealand books.

She has noticed that New Zealanders like to read about New Zealanders.

As district librarian, Linda could easily take responsibility for all book purchases, but she doesn't, preferring to split the buying between several staff.

"You are not buying for yourself," she says, recognising how important it is to buy what library users want to read.

At the same time, she likes to challenge and stretch readers – taking them down a different path with their reading, getting them to read something different.

"It is a very discerning community," she says of the district's readers.

So how does she know what library users want to read? By doing the same as every other staff member – spending time on the front desk. There are also scribbled notes on paper napkins.

Her job means she is recognised in the community, and it's not unusual for someone to come up to her when she is out to ask about a certain book. She will scribble herself a note and a phone number. Many a restaurant's napkin has ended up on her office desk as she checks the details and phones the person who made the inquiry.

"I am looking forward to being more anonymous," she says, adding that the public role is not one she would have chosen.

Her retirement will not sever her involvement with the library. Producing her library card, she states that she has every intention of using it.

In spite of her very catholic reading tastes, it is the children's library she is eyeing up for her leisure time. Linda is determined to read all the excellent children's books she has never had a chance to.

Ask her what she will do in her retirement and her reply is simple. "I didn't think you had to do anything." But there is talk of more time for cycling, gardening and reading.

Linda will have a good teacher when it comes to learning what retirement is all about. Husband George has been retired for 10 years, and she reckons he is pretty good at it by now.

As to her view of retirement, she has the exact same feeling as she did when she started at the library 25 years ago. In the words of French author Georges Simenon, "I am that happy I am having a wee party in my heart."

- © Fairfax NZ News