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Many small towns brand themselves as welcoming, but when the warmth, hospitality, and quality of life are in such abundance that the town is bestowed an official nickname reflecting it all, you know you’ve found an exceptional locale.
Welcome Feilding, New Zealand, aka “Friendly Feilding,” an industrious, lively town in Manawatū District in the North Island. A sunny little burg half an hour from the coast of the Tasman Sea, Feilding has been awarded the title of “New Zealand’s Most Beautiful Town” numerous times and is filled with plentiful arts, outdoor activities, dining, shopping, and livestock (we’ll get to that last part in a moment).
With bright flowers punctuating year-round activities, Feilding prides itself on a strong local business scene and an atmosphere of home and opportunity for individuals and families alike. Each day in the town center, people are steps away from an honored emblem of Feilding’s past: a towering clock originally set in motion in 1904, the original mechanisms of which are kept in working order.
Kitchener Park captivates visitors with shimmering green lowlands and wetlands of the Awahuri Forest, resplendent with bright-yellow flowering kōwhai trees, and filled with rare lichens, spiders, and countless other native ecological wonders. The tapestry of Feilding also comes alive at The Coach House Museum, where residents and visitors are introduced to the settlers who took the first steps to create what would become an agricultural powerhouse that feeds the world.
Beyond its robust Farmers’ Market, vintage shopping, and cafés, Feilding is famously home to the largest stock saleyard in the Southern Hemisphere. Agricultural history and industry abound in this famous livestock centre, and its auctions are a vital part of the community economy. With its symphony of baying dogs and bellowing livestock, the nonstop operation of the saleyard keeps district revenue thriving.
Of course, the place offering the most abundant exploration in Feilding and Manawatū District is Manawatū Community Hub Libraries.
Feilding built its first library in 1905, moved it to a larger space in 1980, and, after many decades of use followed by several years of thoughtful planning, recently upgraded it with a complete renovation.
With an eye toward culture, color, and nature, the result is exquisite, incorporating indoors with outdoors and taking care to include a bird corridor to support the flight patterns of native birds. As a special gesture, the local iwi, Ngāti Kauwhata, renamed the library building Te Āhuru Mōwai, meaning, a “…space that is a safe haven for our community…a place that champions lifelong learning, quenches curiosity, gives access to technology and is a place of exploration of ideas or interests.”
Warrick Taylor, Library Services Leader, and Adie Johansen, Community Services Manager of Manawatū Community Hub Libraries, enthusiastically recall the meticulous planning to integrate access-driven technology into the renovation of the library.
“We have been here since 1980,” Johansen says. “Through the years, the library stayed pretty traditional; lending books was the main focus. Then, in 2014, we did a review on services to make sure we were providing the best value for the money for our community facility. From that, we determined what we needed to do in the future to provide best services, and that pushed us toward RFID and self-service. That was basically the start of the journey for us.”
They quickly realized that the library space was not suited for modern purposes.
“We were one big open space,” she says, “and we were trying to do group things and also have spaces for private meetings, Justice of the Peace sessions, and other activities. We’ve got all sorts of programs and we run something just about every day of the week, craft programs and activities. We’ve got a number of partnerships with some regular groups, some who have been with us for years, and we have a huge holiday program that we run for the community.”
“We were putting groups in the staff rooms,” Taylor shares, “because we already had two groups in the space, and we couldn’t get them far enough apart that they wouldn’t disrupt each other.”
“We started transitioning more into participation and social connection, and moved away from being a transactional library and more into an engagement space,” he explains. “We’re serving the whole region, and while we do have little volunteer community libraries, this one library has to kind of do it all. It takes around three hours to drive from one side of our district to the other. We have a population of about 34,000, with about 17,000 in town and the other 17,000 made up of our huge rural district.
“Our collection suits our audience,” he smiles, “we’ve probably got more books on chickens and smallholdings and tractors than libraries with four times the population.”
Already utilizing every bit of space they could, it became obvious that they needed not only more space, but space specifically designed to incorporate more meeting rooms with modern technology options for users.
“That started a redevelopment journey for us,” Johansen says, “and in 2018 we put in a proposal to the Council to upgrade this facility. That was a big journey, and Covid happened to the middle, and for cost and other reasons, it took us a long time to actually get there. But in 2021 we got approval to start this, and we went from a 1,100m facility to close to 1,600m. We added-to and completely upgraded pretty much every inch of this facility. We introduced purpose-built meeting rooms and spaces, gave the library its own core area, introduced nice seating spaces and collaboration tables, and managed to include a makerspace and cafe.”
Taylor reflected on the revelations that occurred while they planned. “As we went through the development of what this facility needed for our community moving forward, we quickly learned that people in our community do a lot of things at night. During the day, they work, and there are a lot of farming communities here that make use of daylight. So, when they requested to have a swim club meeting, or a workshop, or some other type of meeting, it was all happening between 6 and 9pm.”
Initially, the library scheduled staff to be in the facility after-hours for clubs and meetings led by the community, but for budgetary reasons that became untenable. They needed a solution that wouldn’t require staffing the library after-hours. Already longtime users of Bibliotheca selfChecks, they were told about open+ and ultimately reached out to Scott County Library in Minnesota after encountering a story on LinkedIn about Scott County’s success with open+ for after-hours access.
Johansen connected with Kristy Rieger, Technology Manager at Scott County Library.
“Kristy was beyond helpful,” she says, “We had video chats, and she provided us with all of her documentation, background, and what they got up to. They’ve been running open+ for about four years. Now, we have it, too, and it allows the community to access the library to browse, use computers and wifi, print, copy, scan, check-out books, study, and use pre-booked meeting rooms with a PIN.”
Initially, library staff were hesitant about granting patron access to the library after-hours, but Johansen says “…they’re fantastic, now, and were even after the first couple of days. We have a process similar to what Kristy set up in Scott County, in that it’s not a blanket approval. You actually have to physically come into the library and go through an orientation with staff, and we talk you through how to use Open Plus after-hours access, what’s appropriate and not appropriate while you’re here. That seems to be the first thing that weeds out undesirable behaviors: if you’re not prepared to come and have a face-to-face with staff, then you’re not getting access.”
She continues, “Once staff got through the first couple of orientations and got comfortable doing them, and once staff recognized that nothing was out of place the mornings after patrons had after-hours access, it was like an instant sigh of relief. Patrons are loving this, they’re respecting this, this is great for our community. Staff got into showcasing it and they’re doing a really good job of talking about it. The team will say, ‘Oh, look! Don’t forget! You can come in after hours!'”
The library advertises the opportunity for patrons to access the facility after-hours in a welcoming and reassuring way:
“Open Plus is a membership add-on that provides self-service access to Manawatū Community Hub Libraries (MCHL) at our facility – Te Āhuru Mōwai, in extension of staffed hours up to 11pm. It does not replace or reduce staffed hours. Instead, it provides our community with more opportunities to use Te Āhuru Mōwai when it works best for them. It works similarly to 24/7 gyms where members use their membership card to unlock the facility.”
In preparing to implementing open+, Taylor and Johansen preemptively reached out to Feilding police and fire departments, and before the renovated library opened, the very first tour was given to the police and fire teams. Together with library crew, they walked the entire facility and ironed out safety details, and the library supplied fobs permitting twenty-four-hour entry into the facility and PIN codes for emergency call centres.
Johansen explains, “If someone rings and says, ‘I’m at the Community Hub in Feilding,’ the call centre tells the police, ‘Here’s the PIN code to get in and help this person’ so no one has to go outside and try to flag the police in. They can always get into this building, and we did the same thing with the fire brigade, in case any situation happened.”
After the police and fire brigades toured the library and understood the plans for extended access, Johansen says, “They realized, ‘It’s okay, other places have been doing after-hours access.’” The police and fire teams even began talking about Open Plus to community members, giving the library free word-of-mouth advertising from a trusted source.
Of the renovation, Johansen says, “We needed to make it work for the community. We recognized our community needed those late nights. We didn’t have more money for additional staffing, so as part of the renovation we put in open+. We built it into the cost as we put the project together. Since we were completely redoing the entire building, we had the opportunity to put in open+ and make it work for us. We told the architects: this is what we’re doing. We need to make provisions to make this work, please build it into your plan.”
Being the first library in New Zealand to give its community after-hours access by using open+ has meant that Taylor and Johansen find themselves answering lots of questions from other libraries, which they cheerfully oblige.
“We have had I don’t know how many libraries from around New Zealand come through to ask us, ‘How did you get it across the line? What are you doing? Have you had any incidents?’” says Johansen. “And honestly, it’s, ‘No, there have been no incidents, this is how we use it, just do it.'”
At a recent workshop of approximately forty libraries using the same library management system, Taylor was offered a 5-minute spotlight at the end to talk about open+. Johansen says, “He was inundated with questions. And we’ve been a little bit nervous about singing our praises, but we really want to do a massive shout-out to say, ‘Hey, we’re the first in New Zealand to allow people to use the library unstaffed.'”
In the few months since instituting open+, hundreds of patrons have signed up to use it, and the library has seen significant use on Sundays, a day the library is closed.
“We’ve got people that just love Sundays, since they’re always busy throughout the week,” Johansen says. “Being able to visit the library on a Sunday, on their own time, without having to rush, is really great for them.”
Taylor echoes the sentiment. “We’re a rural community and some people come into town once a week because they live forty minutes or an hour away, even more for some folks. They don’t want to keep coming and going, so when they’re here, they want to get more things done.”
Whether a weekday or weekend, after-hours use is significant, and how patrons use the library during those times varies from one person to another.
“One night, when I was here after six,” Taylor shares, “I got chatting with a patron who is in just about every night; he parked himself in a space and was quite happy with it. Then, I turned around and saw someone leaving through the door; it was a patron coming in obviously after work and she grabbed her books and was gone. That’s what worked for her, while the other person was there for the night. Different use cases. We’re making the library available for people when they need it.”
Johansen agrees. “Basically, Open Plus gives the community access from 9:30am to 11pm, seven days a week. Now that we’re used to people being here when we’re not, we’ve had comments from the community that it would be amazing if we were open at six in the morning, on their way to work. Our goal in 2025 is to look at extending it at the other end, for those early risers.
When considering expanding Open Plus hours to early mornings, they have no qualms about setting it up. “The software is refreshingly easy to use,” Johansen says.
“I was going to say,” Taylor adds, “the software is pretty darn easy to use. The biggest part is just setting up all the initial systems and processes and agreements.”
Patrons continually share positive feedback about accessing the library after-hours, and two stories in particular stand out to Johansen and Taylor. One family has a young daughter who experiences cyclical sleep patterns during which she is frequently awake for 12-16 hours overnight. The child’s mother said that there aren’t many places that they can go to do things at those hours, but because of Open Plus at the library, she “…is absolutely loving having somewhere positive to go with her daughter.”
“Another one of the lovely stories that we got quite early on was a young person who apparently was really struggling with their course,” Taylor says. “They’re in uni and they were studying at home, but it didn’t work. It was quite a busy home environment, lots of people around. And they were able to come in here to study, and they jokingly said, ‘My marks improved so much, I swear my tutor’s going to think I’m cheating.'”
“Their grades have gone from here to here,” he says, gesturing with one arm low and the other high, “because they could come in here and just study for three, four, five hours straight. And that’s exactly the kind of thing that we envisioned open+ being used for.”
“Open Plus is working exactly as we’d hoped and intended,” Taylor continues. “It’s providing after-hours access and wider opportunities for people to come and use the space. It’s the community’s resource. They can use it literally whatever time they choose to use it, not just the times we staff it. People love the service we’re offering, and it certainly works here. They appreciate what we’re offering them and they are one-hundred percent respectful.”
As Open Plus hours are used more and more every day, he says. “It’s just growing in use over time as word spreads. It’s my running joke that, come Boxing Day, when the family is driving each other up the wall, I’m bringing them in for a tour of the library. Come Boxing Day, there will be people in.”
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