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Dunedin City Council

Dunedin Public Libraries
Supporting Library Week 2009

Escape, Explore, Discover : Ki te whai ao, ki te ao mārama.

Dunedin Public Libraries - Why We Are Amazing

This week is Library Week, so we are celebrating just how amazing we are.

Here are some facts (some well known / others not so) that give you a small insight into just how much happens behind the scenes every day. There are a lot of people hard at work to make the library an amazing place to visit every day.

Amazing Facts - Monday 10 August
  • The City Library handles an average of 3 – 4 thousand returned items every day.


  • Dunedin Public Libraries are involved in an interloans system with other Libraries in New Zealand and Australia. Between June 2008 and June 2009, Dunedin Public Libraries lent books to 108 other Libraries, and borrowed 91. If we don’t have a book a customer wants, we can look into ‘interloaning’ it for you.


  • Last year the Bindery worked on approximately 30,075 individual jobs using a combination of 8 different adhesives, 5.5 kilometres of spine tape, over 23 standard processes and an uncountable number of speciality treatments.


  • Has your family made a mark in the history of New Zealand? Why not find out? The Heritage Collections hold shipping records dating back to the mid-nineteenth century and a complete run of the ODT from 1861 to the present.


  • Home Services have only 2.4 full time employees on their team and account for 3.5 percent of the Dunedin Public Library network issues.


  • The Teen Space in the City Library has 4 digital touch-screen listening stations with cordless headphones.


  • Mosgiel was left off all promotions for Chocolate Storytime this year, and it was on purpose. They have been so over-run in the past that only a few posters were made for Mosgiel Library to put up. They still got a great crowd, and it was much more manageable.


  • Waikouaiti Library was first established in 1862, which makes it one of the oldest libraries in the country and the oldest in the Dunedin Public Library network.


  • Blueskin Bay Library is arguably the greenest! In their last waste audit they only had 20 grams of waste to report, which was basically one piece of plastic!


  • The Dunedin Public Libraries Bookbus service is 60 years old in April next year - party time!

  • Dunedin Public Libraries had the first children’s lending library in NZ, which will celebrate its centenary in 2010.


  • Port Chalmers is the home of Ralph Hotere and the library is proud to own a number of his works. These hang along side 3 drawings of another New Zealand artist - Joanna Paul.


Use the navigation links below to select more 'amazing facts' about Dunedin Public Libraries. These will be added to the website each day as library week unfolds.

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