Nikki Price is retiring from her role as a senior librarian at Dannevirke Library after 23 years on the job.
Nikki Price is retiring from her role as a senior librarian at Dannevirke Library after 23 years on the job.
Senior librarian Nikki Price is looking forward to having a more relaxed pace in life.
After 23 years at Dannevirke Library, Nikki is retiring.
While she and her husband have no firm plans regarding what to do next, they want to do a little bit of travelling as well as spend some time with family.
“We’ll just wing it for a while and see what pops up.”
Nikki started off at the library as an administrator after being a stay-at-home mum for 14 years. It was a part-time role which worked with school hours during term time.
She says when she first started, the Tararua District Library Trust managed the library on behalf of the council, until the council took over the management in 2003.
Nikki eventually moved up to become the fulltime children’s librarian in 2007.
She’s seen a lot of changes at the library in her time, especially with automation behind the scenes.
She says with the old system, if they wanted to generate a statistical report, it could be quite cumbersome.
“Whereas now, you still have to put in the right parameters in but it’s more detailed.”
The face-to-face interaction with library users is still there, which “is so important”.
Libraries have become about more than books.
“We’re community hubs,” Nikki says, adding they have knitting groups, seed libraries, children’s groups, and book clubs for adults, and in Pahīatua and Eketāhuna they have a Justice of the Peace who comes in weekly.
“Providing those sort of public services at a central community hub is so important.”
People also come in to read newspapers, or sit in groups to “solve the problems of the world around the table”.
Nikki says what is also important is that libraries are free for everyone to use.
“People don’t have to come in here and buy something. They don’t have to be a library member.”
There have been a lot of things Nikki has been proud of about her job, but one is the reading programmes where she goes out to the local schools.
“The schools have been just wonderful coming on board, because it’s all about literacy and reading.”
One thing Nikki emphasises is literacy is not just about reading books.
“Anything digital that you do, you have to be able to read, you have to be able to understand.
“In order to get to that point where you’re ready to branch out in the big wide world, the more reading mileage you have under your belt, the easier it is going to be to navigate the world.
“It doesn’t matter what you read, if you read graphic novels, if you read magazines, you read non-fiction, if you read fiction, if you read newspapers, if you read lots of signs – anything that you read, it’s already mileage so that when you’re ready to branch out into the big wide world, you’ve got that and you’ve got that knowledge.”
Nikki says a key is letting children choose what to read for themselves, even if the book might be perceived as being too hard for them.
“To my way of thinking, the child will learn. So if they pick something, they might just want to look at the pictures, to be honest. The reading part will come later, and they soon learn what they can and can’t read.”
Nikki reading to children during one of the many programmes run at Dannevirke Library.
Nikki says what she will miss the most about her job is the interaction, not only with the public but also the staff, the programmes, the activities that have been developed.
“They might come out of my brain but I can’t implement them by myself, so I have to have staff buy-in and help as well. It’s not a lone-ranger job. It’s a team thing.”
She says it’s important to keep those programmes going.
“Because those kids are our future. The more we can upskill them, the better off that community will be.”
