Georgia Bruyel (left) is taking over as the head librarian at the Osoyoos Branch as Kathy Burton (right) retires. Burton’s last day was Friday. She’ll continue to be involved with the library’s book club and Friends of the Library. (Richard McGuire photo)
After nearly 35 years at the Osoyoos Branch, head librarian Kathy Burton has retired from Okanagan Regional Library (ORL).
Burton served her last day on the job Friday, but she plans to remain involved through the library’s book club and through the Friends of the Library group.
Replacing her is Georgia Bruyel, who worked in Osoyoos as a children’s librarian from 1992 until 2009, when she took charge of the branch in Okanagan Falls.
Burton, who celebrated a birthday the day before she retired, is coy about her age, but suggests it was a factor in her decision to retire.
“Today’s my birthday, so I decided it’s time,” she said in an interview last Thursday.
Burton decided not to stay to the end of January, when she would have been with the library a full 35 years.
Like Bruyel, Burton also began as a children’s librarian.
When she started in 1981, she had no special qualifications other than having children of her own.
“I was just lucky,” she said. “I learned on the job and I was lucky to be hired as the children’s librarian on a part-time basis and then over the years the hours just gradually increased. I was in the right place at the right time.”
Despite her lack of formal library credentials, Burton said she received excellent training from ORL.
A decade later, when the previous head librarian retired, Burton moved into the top spot – a job she held for nearly 25 years.
Libraries have changed considerably during Burton’s career, but the biggest change is computerization, which was introduced in the early 1990s.
In her first decade, Burton recalls that library catalogues were on little index cards and when books were checked out the due date was stamped onto a card in the book.
Staff had to undergo special training to learn the new computerized system.
“The Okanagan Regional Library has been very good about keeping us all trained and organizing workshops and opportunities for training,” Burton said.
And while nothing in particular stands out as a career highlight for Burton, she said she derived daily enjoyment from working with library patrons and getting to know them and their reading tastes.
“The great joy of the work is the people, the customers and the connections,” she said. “It’s very definitely a community library.”
Although many customers have switched to e-books, the library continues to be very active with people coming in to borrow printed books.
As she got to know patrons’ tastes in books, she was able to make personalized suggestions as the branch received newly released books. And she often got into discussions about the books customers borrowed.
“People will return a book and they’ll say, ‘Oh this was a really good book, you’re going to love it, you must read this book,’” she said. “So there’s lots of interaction and they recommend books to us. A lot of our customers read far more than I do. They have the time, so they borrow stacks of books and when they bring them back, they let me know which books were the good ones and which ones weren’t worth it.”
Burton’s own favourite reading genres are memoirs and mysteries.
She says she would rather read a memoir about a particular portion of a person’s life, such as an adventure or travel, rather than an autobiography or biography covering a person’s life story.
Being a librarian was never boring, she insists.
“It’s very interesting because you’re interacting with the community every day,” she said. “Sometimes it’s not a very quiet library because there’s lots of interaction. You hear about everybody’s life story. I guess because I’ve lived here so long I know a lot of people’s stories, so I know their children and their grandchildren. There’s a lot of sharing.”
Most requests for books are quite ordinary, Burton said. In addition to the books moving continually between ORL’s 29 branches, the library also hunts down books that aren’t in the ORL system through interlibrary loans.
“Those would probably be the most unusual requests, perhaps, because they are not books in our library, but we are able to find them elsewhere and bring them in,” she said.
While the requests themselves aren’t normally odd, Burton said there is sometimes an incongruity between the customer and the book they are requesting.
Burton was born and raised in Kelowna and other than a few years away on Vancouver Island, she has lived her entire life in the Okanagan. She and her husband Tom came to Osoyoos in 1970 when he worked for the Bank of Montreal and was transferred here.
For the first decade in Osoyoos, Burton was a stay-at-home mother raising three children. Only one, her daughter Kara Burton, still lives in Osoyoos, where she manages the Osoyoos Museum.
When Burton began as a children’s librarian, her children often took part in the summer reading program.
Kara recalls as a little girl participating in at least one July 1 parade under a large bookworm that her mother obtained from ORL for the event.
Now that she’s retired, Burton plans to help her daughter at the museum.
“Kara’s got jobs lined up for me,” said Burton. “And I’m a quilter. I will probably do lots of volunteer work. I’ll have time to go to fitness classes and to do what ever I want.”
Aside from involvement with Friends of the Library and the book club, Burton expects to spend some time at the library.
“I’ll probably come in and bug them,” she jokes. “Help them put books away. I’ll definitely miss the community and the connection with all the customers they have been the great joy of the work here.”
RICHARD McGUIRE
Osoyoos Times
