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North Delta librarian retiring after 24 years in the community

Frances Thompson looks back on the changes she’s seen during her time at the George Mackie Library
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Community librarian Frances Thomson will be retiring after 24 years at the George Mackie Library. (Grace Kennedy photo)

The last two weeks of Frances Thomson’s time at the George Mackie Library is going by slowly.

And she’s thankful for that.

“It’s not zipping along fortunately, because I don’t want it to,” Thomson said, sitting behind her desk at the library on a Monday morning. “I still want to enjoy it.”

Thomson has been a librarian at the Mackie Library for 24 years, braving changes in circulation, staffing and the community during her tenure. In the last year and a half, she’s also written a monthly library column for the North Delta Reporter.

In early March, she’ll be stepping away from her role in the library and stepping into a life of retirement. It’ll be a change from her career as a librarian, which started through unlikely circumstances back in the 1980s.

“I kind of fell into librarianship as an afterthought,” she said.

At the time, Thomson was a recent university graduate who had just got her first job as a court and crime reporter at a newspaper in Kitimat. It was a twice-weekly publication, and with high hopes of success, moved to publishing five times a week. It failed, and Thomson lost her job.

But it wasn’t a total loss.

“I got a job in the public library. And I loved it,” she said. “I had no formal training, but I learned on the job.”

In Kitimat, Thomson became engrossed in children’s programming, doing book clubs and story times with young readers. It ultimately influenced her decision to go back to school at UBC to be a librarian.

From there, her career was a work of serendipity.

In 1991, while Thomson was going to school, a children’s librarian position opened up in Abbotsford’s Clearbrook Library. She applied.

“The whole time I was thinking, oh they were just being nice. We’ll interview her as a courtesy,” Thomson said. “I had no idea where Clearbrook was, I drove all the way out there and had this laid-back interview — because again, I thought they were just being nice, I don’t have a chance at getting this job.

“And I got the job. They held it for me until May, until I was done.”

It was a long commute from her home in Kitsilano to the library in Abbotsford, but within three years she was able to get as far west as North Delta.

There she stayed, continuing to specialize as a children’s librarian.

“I love seeing that. The influence,” she said about how libraries impact kids. “My dad took me to the public library — I always tell the kids that. That was our time together. And my mum read to me, all the classics. I can remember my mum reading me Little Women and Heidi. Long before I could read those books myself she was sitting on my bed reading them to me.”

“It becomes a habit,” she continued, expanding on why she encourages parents to read to their young kids. “They’re used to sitting with you and looking at these pictures in the book, and eventually they start to understand those words, and they start to speak those words.

“It’s an amazing process, the whole language acquisition.”

Thomson isn’t a children’s librarian anymore — although that wasn’t necessarily her choice. In the early 2000s, the Fraser Valley Regional Library decided to do away with specialist librarians, turning Thomson’s position into an information services supervisor, “which is quite a mouthful,” she said. A few years later, she was made community librarian.

“People say, ‘How could you be at the same place for so long? Didn’t you want a change?’ Well, I didn’t need a change because I kept getting changes forced on me.” She laughed. “That was change and challenge enough.”

It wasn’t only Thomson’s job title; libraries changed too.

Circulation is down across North American libraries. But, she added, “we’re busier than ever in terms of people in the building.”

“After three o’clock, there’s hardly an empty seat,” she said. “We’ve got temporary tables out of our meeting room that we set up just to make space for people that are here studying, reading, reading the newspapers.”

This communal space is a change from the “stuffy, absolutely silent buildings” of yore, Thomson said.

“We still get older people complaining about too much noise. But we don’t enforce that,” she continued. “We’re not the shushing librarians of the 50s and the 60s.”

And now, she said, there are many young librarians coming into the system.

“That’s great; they have new ideas, more energy,” Thomson said. “Yeah, it’s time to step aside and let others lead the library on to the next phase.”

Thomson’s last day as a librarian at the George Mackie Library is on March 9 (although she’s technically on vacation until end of April). Her replacement will start in May, and usher in a new era at the North Delta library.

“I’m ready,” she said about retirement. “People say you know when you’re ready, and I know.

“I don’t want to be one of those people that dreads going to work.”



grace.kennedy@northdeltareporter.com

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