Communities will soon be seeing improvements at their local libraries due to a one-time investment of $8 million that is going towards COVID-19 relief and recovery. The funding aims to help public libraries across the province to adapt to changing needs.

“We will be receiving $42,253 from the COVID relief funding,” says Terrace Library Director, Fiona Bruce.”We're still in the early stages trying to determine what we want to spend the funding on. At this moment, we are really focusing on inclusive spaces and having programs or services that will help make our library more welcoming to our entire community.”

Bruce says this funding will help the Terrace Public Library in big ways. Some of the improvements they are wishing to make include the expansion of digital collections, enhancing their programming and providing high-speed internet access.

“This one-time grant from the province will allow us to increase the services that we can provide and to look at different ways we can provide services to our community,” adds Bruce.

The Terrace Public Library has been at the forefront of supporting the community throughout the pandemic, providing different options to small and large families.

“During these past two years, we continued to provide programs for children and families, some of which were online. People could access stories that we recorded, we offered various e-learning tools and members could pick up activity kits and take them home to do with their family.”

As for future goals, Bruce hopes the funding will have a positive impact on the library’s capacity to keep the community connected to learning resources.

“We are speaking to a few of our community partners to look at some different programming that we might be able to do with them to reach different areas of our community that we haven't been able to reach before this time.”

Libraries across B.C. are continuing to support initiatives to increase the provincewide collection of ebooks, magazines and other online services that people can access using their library cards.