2023 saw a steady flow of books stream through the South Central Regional Library (SCRL).
It's difficult to identify the most checked-out book because their collection covers so many categories said Cathy Ching, SCRL director.
"The ballpark on the most popular author in Altona: the Berenstain Bears books. Some of them have been checked out over 200 times. We're probably going to pull them off the shelf and replace them with brand new ones because I'm pretty sure they're hanging on by a thread. For popular adult fiction the old standbys like David Baldacci and Clive Cussler, they’re still timeless. An Instagram person named Colleen Hoover, her books - they're mystery romance - we can't keep them on the shelf."
The classic Robert Munsch books registered 204 checkouts. In the Inspirational Fiction category, 'Kidnapped' by Dee Henderson was taken out 199 time. In Adult Fiction, 'The Choice' by Nicholas Sparks saw 129 checkouts, but Kristen Hannah is the most popular fiction author with several of her books registering well over 100 checkouts. Local writers such as Altona's Mitch Toews, author of Pinching Zwieback, have been popular as well.
In a statistical comparison between 2022 and 2023 prepared for her annual report to the board, Ching notes that 2022 is the first comeback year since the chaos in 2019. It also shows that the genre with the biggest increase in check outs is Children's Books.
"In Winkler in 2023, over 77,000 children's books were checked out. For children's books for all of South Central, the five branches, with 61,000 picture books, 64,000 junior fiction books and 26,000 junior nonfiction books. Our junior collections are the biggest circulation. For 2023 in all of our branches we checked out 280,500 books. It's a big jump!"
The summer reading program was as popular as ever for SCRL.
"We were back to pre-COVID numbers. We had 2500 children in our programs across all the libraries. That was good to see. I can hear the [scanners] beeping from my office up front in the Winkler branch. It was just constant. During summer reading when they were so busy, in one day they checked out over 3000 books. They were tired."
The program is totally free pointed out Ching.
"It kind of caught us surprise because we thought the numbers would kind of creep back. They just came back full bore."
Overall membership numbers jumped up too.
"We brought in almost 1200 new members since December last year. Newcomers to our communities, newcomers to our country joined because it was pretty simple. In all of our municipalities, we have 44,660 people as of the 2021 census. We have 32,200 memberships. Not everybody's using their cards in the library. A lot of people are using OverDrive and E libraries, that kind of thing. But that's a huge portion of people that have library cards. We pretty much know that we have over half of the potential people who have library cards that are using them."
Ching says help from outside the community has stepped up a lot.
"In Winkler, we have Kenton Harder I believe his name is. We've started an Astro club. [Kenson] has a huge telescope. He is partnering with the library and in the fall and come spring again, we'll have Astro nights. Look at the stars through that telescope. That's quite exciting! People are very excited about that because we tend to forget about our science people, right?"
And who says bookworms don't like getting out and having some fun? In Winkler, because it's one of the bigger libraries, on the occasional Wednesday after closing, the library hosts Nerf battles.
"I think the adults enjoy it more than the children," said Ching with a chuckle.
Looking ahead to 2024, Ching says they'll continue to focus on what they do best: programming and our collection development.
"We added board games to our collection. We spent $5600 on board games this Christmas. We have Ticket to Ride and Catan."
The game is Scrabble has scored a bingo with patrons.
"Yeah, games AND puzzles. Puzzles are huge! Morden has 270 puzzles. During COVID, the Morden people puzzled. When they were done, they donated their puzzles. We probably have in our collection 600 puzzles in all of our branches that you can check out."
The library's other offerings include unlimited, simultaneous access to digital comics and graphic novels. a blog named Novel Experiences plus the Books & Banter podcast.
SCRL has branches in Altona, Winkler, Morden, Manitou, and Miami. The Morden branch is closed till January 20th due to renovations.
Planning is currently underway to celebrate the library's 60th anniversary in March 2025.