David Todd’s earliest memory of a library was visiting his local Tonbridge Library with his family as a child in the late 1980’s. “I always looked forward to visiting the library and browsing the books in the children’s section”.
Nowadays, David visits a library almost daily here as he’s been involved professionally with the Kent Libraries & Registration since 2008.
The role David occupies now in our local community is the Assistant Service Manager for the Sevenoaks Library District as well as managing the Register Office at Mansion House in Tunbridge Wells. The thing he enjoys the most is “working with such a large number of different colleagues and customers for an organisation which provides so many valued services to people in the local area”. That last statement is undoubted, here at CommunityAd we are delighted to see people of all ages utilising the invaluable community assets that are libraries and we were equally delighted to have a chat with David.
What book would you recommend everyone read?
There’s so much personal preference involved in books that it’s hard to recommend something everyone would enjoy, but Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as a Stage is a really accessible and enjoyable book about Shakespeare, which covers both his life and works in a reasonably short and very entertaining way. Shakespeare covered such universal themes which are still relevant today and so it’s a really good introduction to his life and works.
It must be great to have opened your doors again after such a long absence?
Yes, it’s been truly heart-warming to see just how much our customers have missed using the libraries across the whole Sevenoaks district. Whilst we have been open in a variety of ways during various lockdowns since last summer, we were closed for browsing as well as other parts of our service for large parts of 2020 and 2021 due to lockdown restrictions.
It’s also been great to be able to get our branch libraries open in the past few months and receive so much positive feedback on how much customers in the surrounding towns and villages have valued our services and the difference our services make to their lives.
We’ve also received a great deal of feedback on how much people appreciated being able to access our services during lockdown since March 2020, and across the county had a huge number of people have been accessing our online services.
How was the Summer Reading Challenge received this year by the Sevenoaks community?
We’ve had fantastic engagement in the Summer Reading Challenge this year from the Sevenoaks Community from so many families across the whole district. Frontline staff worked really hard on putting together some brilliant displays to help advertise this year’s “Wild World Heroes” theme, as well as engaging with and promoting the challenge to families visiting during the school holidays.
Despite the challenges of the past year and a half and inevitable changes to how people feel about visiting public places since the start of the pandemic, we’ve had well over 1,500 children across all 11 libraries in the Sevenoaks district signing up to and completing the Summer Reading Challenge, and our libraries have been buzzing throughout the school holidays.
Why is it crucial that a thriving community like Sevenoaks has access to a library?
Libraries have so much to offer people in the Sevenoaks area, giving access to so many different services under one roof and acting very much as very much a community hub.
As well as our core services including free Wi-Fi, public computers and printing, books, audiobooks and access to newspapers and periodicals, there’s a wealth of free access to online subscriptions such as a huge range of e-magazines, e-audiobooks and e-books. For young readers all of our libraries have a great Children’s section full of board books, picture books, lots of children’s fiction and non-fiction to help with homework. There’s also a wealth of online encyclopaedias such as Britannica, Cartoon archives, Oxford Bibliographies, consumer and legal information, Which? consumer advice and British Standards to name but a few. School children can also access a number of different resources to help with homework.
Several libraries across the district also hold a huge amount of rare local history resources in the Local Studies sections, which can tell people all about the history of their local area. For customers who can’t access our services easily face-to-face, we also provide a Home Library Service which our volunteers help to deliver, postal loan services through our Open Access system as well as all of our online services.
Sevenoaks Library also has a fantastic Museum which houses many different collections of artefacts, and an Art Gallery which hosts some great exhibitions throughout the year. With 11 libraries open across the district, residents in Sevenoaks have access to so many free services which really do make a difference to the wellbeing of so many people from all different walks of life and all ages. As well as all of these resources and services, we have a host of regular events and activities for families such as our Rhyme Time and Storytime sessions, craft activities and other events which we are looking forward to re-launching later in the year as our services return to normal.