General Urban Waterloo Updates and Rumours

[danbrotherston]

It's smaller than the Downtown Kitchener branch, for sure, but I think it's a pretty respectably-sized library for a city of 100,000.

KPL and WPL should merge under the Region of Waterloo Library, though.

I disagree on merger.  I love the KPL..   The programs and their attitude is great.  I would hate to lose it in an amalgamated system that would now have to cater to the whole Region..

Sometimes smaller is better...

I agree that merging would be a bad idea.  It's not that "smaller is better", it's that each library focuses on its target audience and thus can be more specific.  

The region library manages rural libraries and those are VERY unique challenges.  They solve it with unique operating hours, pop-up libraries and the like.  It's a great challenge and they do a decent job of bringing library services to very small towns.  Neither WPL nor KPL have those skills or challenges.

KPL has done a great job of building up the central library, and moving past traditional library services, they have done well in a city with difficult problems to solve as well.

WPL, I dunno, I've read less about them, but they seem to have very strong demand in their new branches, so they're doing something right.

The point is, each library has unique strengths and challenges, unifying them would eliminate that diversity of response to challenges.  It's an example of where unifying wouldn't be good (on the other hand they have inter-library loans, so the part where bigger is better (collection size) is already unified).