Remembering the rugged old days of cantankerous teachers and chilly classrooms, muddy cross country runs in the rain and snow, maths, maths and more maths, it can be easy to toss ‘education’ and ‘learning’ into a box best forgotten or even set alight.
Times change, apparently. Surprisingly. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, librarians, and the libraries that house them, adapt.
Think of the humble kea, our very own alpine parrot. For centuries they were used to pecking away at seeds and larvae and beetles, but now, the modern kea is able to remove laces from boots, sprinkles from cakes and rubber items from vehicles with the deft skill of a trained recycler. Talk about adaptable.
Just like libraries.
And libraries have always been about learning. About making the world freely and easily available to locals. Once, this simply happened through having a broad collection of paper and ink artifacts popularly known as ‘books’, giving them categories decipherable only by those skilled and talented necromancer librarians, and placing those very artifacts on closely packed, dark shelves.
But then, behold, the internet (go back and read that again, but make the voice in your head boom out the words, with lots of echo, like James Earl Jones in a stadium). Why have dim shelves when we can have bright screens?
Yet libraries persist (see the notes above about adaptability).
There are still books and we can even help you find where we have, in our nefarious librarian wisdom, chosen to tuck them away on our hundreds upon hundreds of metres of shelves.
But beyond the books, we have a whole team dedicated to lifelong learning. We even call the team the Lifelong Learning Team. Adaptable, that’s us.
We host music lessons and science talks, children’s programmes and more children’s programmes, community-led events, performances, book launches and rocket launches, reo Māori sessions, movie screenings and reading programmes. We even have Blueprint, the City Library Makerspace where anyone can learn how to create and share whatever their imagination can conjure using the latest in fabrication technology, design software and creative tools.
And that stuff that magically sweeps across those little bright screens? We can help with learning about that too.
As a whole, in the course of a year, Palmerston North City Library, including our Community Libraries, host over a thousand learning events in various guises from booked programmes to drop-in sessions, to tutorials, Heritage talks, community connections and more.
Check out some of our current programmes here. Which would suit you? Bring along your friends and family, maybe even an enemy or two, and prepare to be amazed.
Yes. Learning these days is a blast, a riot, and a whole lot of brand new stuff all dressed up and ready to show off.
– Sean Monaghan
