Aimee Pieterse – Team Leader, Maniototo Community Library

​​Kia ora Aimee and thanks for sharing your career pathway with our readers. First up; can you tell us about your current role? What is your job title and what do you do day-to-day? Can you also tell us what qualifications you have?
Kia ora koutou katoa.
I am the Team Leader at the Maniototo Community Library in Ranfurly, Central Otago. The Maniototo Library is a small rural library serving a community of approximately 1,600 people. In my role, I manage the day-to-day operations of the library from Monday to Thursday and have a library assistant who covers Fridays.I don’t have any specific library qualifications, but I do have a Bachelor in Comprehensive Nursing and a Postgraduate Certificate in Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing. Although these qualifications are not directly related to libraries the knowledge and skills they equipped me with are very useful for developing rapport and positive relationships with our library users and the wider community.I am told you operate your library pretty much solo. You are serving all parts of a rural community. What are the challenges you face day-to-day?
Yes, it’s just me and my library assistant who works Fridays for me. I also have two casual staff members to cover leave. I do sometimes miss working within a big team environment, being able to bounce ideas off one another and the camaraderie you develop working alongside others. We do have catch-ups as a team but this can be hard to organise at times as none of my team lives in the Ranfurly township. Every month, the team leaders of the Central Otago Libraries meet in Alexandra to discuss what’s happening in our spaces and plan future programmes and events. I find these meetings invaluable and my fellow team leaders provide great support to me in my role as a sole librarian. Being a smaller library, you might think our borrowers have a limited collection available to them, but we have found ways to punch above our weight! We have collections that rotate between the smaller Central Otago Libraries bringing a new range of fresh titles on a regular basis. Our borrowers are also able to place holds on books from both Central Otago Libraries and Queenstown Lakes Libraries at no charge.

Your library is based on a school site and serves local early childhood education centres also. How do you work with them to meet the children’s needs?
Our library is based within Maniototo Area School (Years 1–13); therefore, we have a very special relationship with the school community. We have class visits from each year group weekly and the children are free to come and go from the library. The children will often come in and check out books and play with the lego, puzzles or games during their lunch break.

We are often asked by the students and teachers to source books on various topics for the children’s learning. We are able to source books from all our Central Otago Libraries and our Queenstown lakes partners, which gives us a wonderful depth of titles to draw upon.

Your library normally would get lots of tourists from the Otago Central Rail Trail. Have you noticed many changes over the last year? How are you adapting?
Although we are not getting the international tourists we are used to seeing, we are getting more local tourists taking advantage of all that Central Otago has to offer. They often pop in on their way through and read a newspaper/magazine or sit and utilise the WiFi and our big comfy chairs. The library is a welcoming space for them to relax and unwind after a long cycle.

Is this the career you always intended to go into?
No, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I finished school so I went to the United States and worked as an au pair. While I was there I volunteered for the American Red Cross working in a local blood donation centre. This inspired me to train to become a nurse on my return home. I gave up nursing when I had my first child and this was when my passion for children’s fiction began! When my children were preschoolers our favourite outing was to the Masterton/Martinborough public libraries where we would get a new selection of books and attend storytime/craft sessions.

What was your idea of what librarians are and what they did before you became one?
Having attended many storytime sessions with my children I had nothing but admiration for the library staff where we lived. It was the librarians who ran the children’s sessions that inspired me to want to work in the library environment. They made the books come alive and made the library a fun and exciting place for children to be. They definitely sparked a love of books and reading in my children and proved to me just how important libraries and librarians are for our communities.

If you were meeting someone who had just finished their undergraduate degree and was contemplating doing a postgraduate LIS qualification what would you say to them? What sort of personal attributes do you think you need to go into LIS work? Especially working in a rural library.
I would say go for it – it’s a very rewarding career. I believe you need to be a people person and have strong communication skills. If you have a genuine passion for books, reading and literacy then libraries will be your happy place. I really enjoy coming to work every day and serving my community. I have worked in several other organisations and in my humble opinion libraries are the best place to work – I know I am biased!

Have you got any librarian mentors/people who influenced you or you admire/learned from? What did they teach you?
The most inspirational librarian I have seen in action would have to be Janet McAllister who ran the children’s programmes at Martinborough Library when my children were preschoolers. Janet made the library such a fun and vibrant place to be and her love of children’s books was infectious. I hope that I am able to sprinkle some of that magic here at Maniototo Library by making it just as fun and welcoming.

Thanks so much for talking with us Aimee!