Kate Ogden - community librarian

Kate Ogden is associate community librarian at New Brighton Library. It's a job that keeps her on her toes.

“Being an ACL is really being whatever needed at the time the librarian looks after three libraries Parklands, New Brighton and Lyttelton so she’s often out of the building. She could be out at meetings or involved in strategic planning for the network and in those cases I’m the person who makes sure that everything keeps going the way it should.”

“I deal with customer issues, building problems… I’m expected to know a lot of the background to a lot of different things, or at least know how to find it out."

There are 16 staff at New Brighton, who deal with approximately 30,000 visitors a month. It’s a busy place, and a popular destination.

“People come and they sit and read all day it is beautiful.”

“We get a lot of tourists they come out and walk the pier and they sit in the library, it’s a real tourist attraction. They love it. Having the library and the pier together is unique.”

The seating and listening posts make for magnificent reading spots, with their view out to the Pacific Ocean across Pegasus Bay. Gardening, cooking and art are perennial favourites, Kate says, and magazines are very popular.

But there are ‘a fair amount of things’ that Kate wishes people would use more. One is the local history collection.

Brighton has had an interesting history. “We have a photo up in the library, that describes New Brighton as being ‘near to Christchurch’. It just strikes me as being quite funny. It’s still got a very villagey feel about it.”

“It has a strong sense of independence there’s a sense that this community is different, and families have been here for years and years … and also a sense that people have hung on here through thick and thin. There’s a strong artistic community too.”

“We have a lot of clippings from newspapers, including plans and pictures of the original pier, and folders and folders on the Pier Promotions Trust and a lot of their paperwork. They campaigned for years to get a pier. There’s masses (of information).”

The fundraising that the trust undertook also has a real community feel there are thousands of names of local people and organisations on the bricks leading up to the library and pier, and more on the pier itself. There are photos of paintings, beach horse racing events and all sorts of other fundraising activities that were organised, as well as official documentation and correspondence.

On June 21 the pier will be lit up for its tenth anniversary, and the library are the venue for the opening event. If Brighton has a best kept secret, Kate says “they haven’t told me”.

“The secrets they keep.”