The Kapi-Mana reports that members of the Porirua, Lower Hutt, Kapiti Coast and Masterton libraries, as well as the Whitireia and WelTec polytechnic libraries, will soon all be able to reserve books from each other. This is great news.
Of course, the one notable absence is the Wellington City Library system…
The biggest difficulty was merging the libraries’ online catalogues.
Wellington City Library was interested in joining SMART, but their cataloguing system was too different to the other six, Mr Anderson says.
One of the key bonuses to local government amalgamation would be the provision of shared services. However I think this goes to show (along with serveral other good examples in the Wellington region) that we don’t need amalgamation in order to provide better services to the ratepayers of the entire Wellington region.
WCC Watch 
This is awesome, and would have been very preferable to the steps I needed to take a few years back to join the Porirua Library because it had a book I really wanted to read. Of course, travelling out there several times wasn’t quite as annoying as having to pay the $25 or so penalty for a lost card that I couldn’t produce upon joining when they noticed I was already in their database, despite it having already been expired for twelve years since I’d shifted away from Porirua. I probably should have questioned that with a more senior staff member.
This is briliant. It’s just a shame that Wellington City Libraries aren’t able to get on board at this stage. I certainly hope that they will be able to in the near future.
Agree that it pays tribute to the fact that you don’t need to totally amalgamate to share services effectively, but, in saying that, who knows? One day there might be a regional library combining all of the city libraries. I wouldn’t be opposed to that.