The Reading Room, October 2009
By Petra Mauerhoff
Chief Librarian/CEO
Eastern Counties Regional Library

Fall is here, the kids are back in school and it’s the perfect season to curl up with a good book, magazine or even a movie after you are done raking the leaves off the lawn or taking a stroll on one of our many beautiful trails!

In addition to loaning out books and other library materials for free, we always have lots of other programs and activities going on within our Eastern Counties Regional Library System. This is especially true for October, which is celebrated across Canada as Canadian Library Month. October often ends up being the busiest month of the year for libraries, and this year is no exception:

This fall, we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of our Headquarters office, the Mulgrave Library and the Canso and Sherbrooke Library Branches as well. Celebrations in Mulgrave are being held on October 3rd, starting at 1pm. We are trying out something new as part of this celebration: a mini-booksale! Our big annual booksale, held every July in conjunction with the Mulgrave Scotia Days Festival is always such a huge success that we decided to try out a second smaller booksale as part of the anniversary celebration. The booksale will open in the garage at approximately 1:30, after the opening ceremonies, along with a BBQ and facepainting planned for the children sponsored by the Mulgrave Volunteer Fire Department and the Town of Mulgrave Recreation Department.

Canso Library celebrated its anniversary during Regatta week in August and the celebrations for the Sherbrooke Library are taking place on October 10th. There will be a BBQ, some speeches by important people (and myself…) and we will award a prize to the winner of our Anniversary Reading Challenge! Come on down to Shebrooke to join us as we celebrate this milestone, starting at 11 o’clock.

This year the Atlantic Provinces Library Association is sponsoring a special Games @ Your Library event from October 18th to the 24th. We invite you to celebrate this special games week in libraries throughout the Atlantic Provinces by dropping by one of our library locations to play Classic Scrabble or Pictureka and see what other activities are planned for you around the games theme as well. Both games were recently donated by Hasbro Canada to libraries across Atlantic Canada. Play a game at your library and enter your name in a draw. One lucky winner in Atlantic Canada will be taking home a Nintendo Wii gaming system!

Our annual major fundraiser, the Share-A-Book Campaign will be launched in October as well. The Share-A-Book campaign is generously sponsored by EnCana Corporation who will match donations from the community dollar for dollar (up to a maximum of $6,000). This year we are holding the launch event at the Petit de Grat Library on October 15th. As part of the celebration starting at 6:30pm local historian Don Boudrot will give a presentation about his two books, “A Walk Through the Past” and “The Days of Wooden Ships and Iron Men: A Brief History of Ile Madame”, there will be cake and door prizes, so come join us and bring your donation!

The Reading Room is a monthly column provided by Eastern Counties Regional Library and sponsored by your newspaper. For further information, call 747-2597, email info@nsme.library.ns.ca or check out ecrl.library.ns.ca