Yesterday, I wrote a Wikipedia talk page section titled “Dear Internet, VIRL deserves better.” on the Vancouver Island Regional Library article. Because for those who don’t know, the public library network on Vancouver Island started 90 years ago as one of three British Columbian library unions, and has brought community, literacy, and a hearth to what is today 39 branches in 37 communities. From Haida Gwaii in the north to Sooke and Sidney in the south (politely stepping around Victoria, more on that shortly), across to Bella Coola on the mainland coast, and all the places the sea touches in between, residents can access literature that helps them stay up to date, learn, and grow as individuals and as a community.

VIRL turned 90 on May 30th, and October is BC Library Month, which means I’m showing up to the birthday party five months late, but at least I brought a present.

What the heck is a book machine?

After making the first major edit over my Monday morning and lunch break, I decided to formulate a research plan for the week and take on this responsibility properly. After all, VIRL staff did just show me one of the coolest machines I’ve witnessed in a long time, the Espresso Book Machine, for which I thanked them by updating its Wikipedia article like a madman (and by sending a nice email to the staff). If you’re curious, compare the article as it stood in August with the current one, and let the byte count speak for itself.

For the unlearned, the Espresso Book Machine prints, collates, covers, and binds a single paperback in a few minutes, and it’s small enough to tuck into the corner of a little library. The idea traces back to a series of lectures the publishing veteran Jason Epstein (unrelated to you know who) gave in 1999, where he imagined a bookshop that could print an out-of-stock title while you waited, and the first one was installed at the New York Public Library in 2007. In January 2024, the company that built them, On Demand Books, closed its doors. And yet, if you walk into the Creativity Commons on the second floor of the Nanaimo Harbourfront branch, you can still print a book. I’ve spent enough of my career watching vendors decide when perfectly good hardware should stop working that this orphaned machine, with its maker gone for more than two years, still turning out paperbacks in a public library feels like a an act of defiance, and a reminder that the people who keep a thing running are the ones who really own it. #Sovereignty am I right?

Two library networks, one island, and a little spite

Now, VIRL is not the only library network in the region, which confuses me as someone who grew up in Sooke during his teenage years and then moved to Victoria for most of his adult life. You see, there’s also the Greater Victoria Public Library, which exists… Seemingly out of spite and for taxation reasons. Which naturally also means that it has its own Wikipedia article, which is in excellent shape….. Seemingly out of spite and for population reasons. But it does mean that I have a regional reference to work from.

When Victoria’s Mechanics’ Institute offered its book collection to the city in 1886, voters worried about their taxes and turned it down as an unnecessary “frill”, so Mayor James Fell bought the books with his own money and kept them in storage until the city came around a year or so later. Fifty years after that and a couple of hours up-island, the Vancouver Island Union Library needed two plebiscites before voters would agree to a library tax, so it seems that on this island, every library worth keeping has had to survive at least one argument about money first.

The GVPL article has an exceptional foundation, particularly its lead paragraph listing the services available at its branches, which are often opaque and buried behind many web pages or deep within pamphlets. Having a Wikipedia section that accurately reflects what’s on offer, front and centre, is highly desirable. Next is of course the history section, which goes through ancient history by Pacific Northwest colonial standards, well before VIRL. My favourite detail is a little private reading room that opened on Yates Street in 1858 and promised to grow just as soon as more books could be shipped up from San Francisco (hold that thought).

Digging for roots

Without getting too thick in the weeds, I suspect I could dredge further back than 1936 for VIRL, though even that far back the name is different, as shown above. VIRL’s own page for the Harbourfront branch mentions that Nanaimo, back when it was mostly a coal town, enjoyed library services as early as the 1860s, which is exactly the kind of loose thread I don’t wanna leave alone. What would interest me is the first library outside of Greater Victoria on the island, and what it was doing all by its lonesome without the later majesty of government stamping it into a legal union in 1936.

The union itself has an excellent origin story as it turns out. According to a Nanaimo News Bulletin piece from the 75th anniversary, the Carnegie Corporation of New York funded a regional library experiment in the Fraser Valley in the early 1930s, it was popular, and similar systems were tried in the Okanagan and on Vancouver Island, though our island only ever received $6,500 of the start-up money ($124,157 in 2026). The Vancouver Island Union Library opened in 1936 with 12,600 books, six branches, and seven van routes through the central island, then promptly ran headfirst into the Depression and a world war, during which the vans could only make their rounds once every eight weeks because of gas and tire shortages. Having spent the past year and a bit travelling this island in a camperized U-Haul, I can confirm that fuel and tires remain two of the great obstacles between a person and tremendously beautiful destinations.

VIRL still proudly bills itself as the second regional library in North America, a claim I’ll be checking this week, given the Okanagan got the same idea at roughly the same time. Once it was formed, no doubt over the course of 90 years it will have had “Troubles”, as GVPL puts it in their history, but also growth. And lastly, I expect that governance will make the last section similar to GVPL’s layout.

What else can we add, though?

After realizing that GVPL’s article is in fact way shorter than expected and 90% history, I think VIRL’s needs to be more well-rounded. Ideally, the Espresso Book Machine “BOO! Stop while you’re ahead!” ok ok, I’ll quit championing that thing. But seriously, there’s more to a library than a summary of what it offers and its history.

Well, VIRL has been publishing these long-term financial plans, and they clearly demonstrate some of the ambitions the organization has. Notably, they see what I’ve seen through my travels, which is that small communities on the island are sleepy and a bit shell-like, especially the remote ones, and that the library is a key player in helping to revitalize them. They’ve also toyed with the idea of a “Bookmobile”, literally something like a my truck but turned into a mobile library. Maybe the idea was closer to a transport truck with a shipping container library, but either way they’ve decided it would cost way too much (wise, trust me). There’s a nice symmetry in it all the same, since ninety years ago the whole system started as seven vans and uh, a lot of optimism.

VIRL describes its branches as third spaces, a sociologist’s term for the places that are neither home nor work but somehow hold a community together, and I think that undersells it a little. In a lot of the towns I pass through, the library is one of the last public rooms where you can sit indoors without buying anything, where the heat is on, the Wi-Fi works, and nobody asks what you’re doing there. Roll into Woss or Tahsis or Sointula on a grey afternoon and the library is often the building that still has its lights on, which is worth more than any spreadsheet could capture, though I’ll take my hand at it with this Wiki article.

Knowing what we own

I’m a pretty big fan of making sure that Canadians know where their tax dollars are going, and what we currently own and operate. This is important, at least until owning a train or a plane or a building can be converted into a subscription by some techno-feudalist billionaire, because these things belong to all of us, and without knowing what we’ve bought or continue to operate, how do we know it’s being well taken care of? Keith Richards, of all people, called it “the public library, which belongs to you” in his memoir, and while I doubt he was thinking about capital planning at the time, he was correct.

This same reasoning or principle was applied when I updated the VIA Rail rolling stock article, which had stayed quite dormant for more than a decade, and when I wrote the North West Transmission Line article (my second ever from-scratch article, oo-lala). So on that train (or wire?) of thought, I think that making some financial sense of VIRL over the past decade and into the next will help bring accessibility to its already transparent financials. By its own figures, VIRL works with 38 local governments across roughly 42,000 square kilometres, and every one of them helps pay for it, so hopefully, with the power of wiki editing, I can help the organization build trust among the tax base it levies to stay in operation.

There’s an old idea called the “tragedy of the commons”, which warns of what happens when shared resources are used without sufficient collective care. But libraries, and Wikipedia for that matter, demonstrate a more hopeful possibility: that something held in common can grow stronger through the contributions of those who value it. Neither institution thrives through goodwill alone, and both depend on people willing to preserve knowledge, share it, and make it accessible to others. A good encyclopedia article is one small act of that stewardship, ensuring that a library’s history, purpose, and contributions to public life remain visible, freely, to anyone who comes looking. Or at least, that’s my humble opinion as a Wikipedia editor.

My first request to readers

An article about a 90-year-old institution serving more than 430,000 people shouldn’t be written by one guy on his lunch breaks, and thankfully it doesn’t have to be. If you live anywhere VIRL reaches, you probably know something I don’t: when your branch first opened, what building it may have lived in before, which librarians have earned recognition for their service, or where to find the old newspaper clipping proving a given historical claim.

As for why it’s worth bothering, a good article does a surprising amount of work for everyone involved:

• For VIRL, a clear, current, well-sourced article is often the first thing people see when they look the library up, and search engines, voice assistants, and AI chatbots all lean heavily on Wikipedia, so a correction made there ripples outward. A tidy list of services answers “can my library do that?” without twelve clicks and a pamphlet.
• For the branches, freely licensed photos on Wikimedia Commons can be reused by local papers, schools, tourism boards, and VIRL itself, without anyone chasing down permission.
• For the community, local history gets written down before the people who remember it are gone, and it lands somewhere that won’t disappear in the next website redesign.
• For the tax base, a plain-language picture of what VIRL does and what it costs makes it easier to trust, and easier to defend when budget season comes around.
• For you, it’s a satisfying way to spend an evening, and a fine excuse to visit your branch with a camera.

A “how-to use Wikimedia” is at the bottom of this post, so read on, or scroll on down if you’re already standing outside your branch with your phone out.

The library’s memory lives in San Francisco

With a project this big, it’s pretty normal to feel daunted. But given that I’ve taken on arguably larger efforts, and the organization’s own documentation is so well organized, I think I can make this work. What I will say is that a lot of documentation was only accessible thanks to the Internet Archive, and I truly wish that more could be made available on an archives page, or a simple FTP archive. Heck, you can get Cloudflare to host it for free these days, or GitHub.

There’s a funny little loop in that, though. In 1858, one of Victoria’s earliest reading rooms was waiting on books from San Francisco before it could grow, and 168 years later, a good chunk of the paperwork I need to tell VIRL’s story sits with the Internet Archive, headquartered in, you guessed it, San Francisco, which tells you some supply chains on this coast have never truly changed. As thankful as I am that the Archive exists, an institution whose entire purpose is keeping things for the rest of us probably shouldn’t depend on a non-profit down in California to keep its receipts.

Letting go for today

Ninety years ago, a handful of island communities argued their way through two plebiscites and the Depression to load books into seven vans and send them out along the island’s roads. During the war those vans came by once every eight weeks, and people waited for them. There’s a lot packed into that image, waiting two months for a book to arrive would send Amazon Prime users into a rage in 2026. And if Canada Post drivers think today’s short gravel road to Zeballos is bad, I can’t help but laugh when I think about their likely reactions to what the road was like 100 years ago.

On that note, while a Wikipedia article won’t shelve a single book or heat a single reading room, it does carry the story of a place out to anyone who asks, at any hour, for free, which is at least one type of book the internet seems to do best. Documentation is an act of care, the way we tell the people who come after us what we built, what it cost, and why we thought it was worth keeping. A public institution that goes undocumented, slowly starts to become something we forget we even own.

A library is a strange and generous thing when you stop to think about it, a building full of objects that belong to everyone and no one in particular, lent out on trust and returned (mostly) on time. It gets its value from being used, and so does Wikipedia, and so, I’d argue, does a community. The tide finds its way into most of those 37 communities twice a day with plenty of people writing about it; the library has been showing up just as reliably for 90 years, and the least we can do is write that part down properly.

So, Dear Internet, VIRL deserves better, and so do the people it serves. Let’s give it an article worthy of 90 years, and if nobody reads it online, I’ll print the finished thing on the Espresso Book Machine and deliver it myself, one van route at a time. BOO! Ok ok, I’m leaving.

How to contribute: a field guide for islanders

You don’t need to be a Wikipedia veteran, a librarian, or a guy with too many browser tabs open to help. Here’s how, roughly in order from easiest to most involved.

Say hello on the talk page

1. Create a free account at Special:CreateAccount. The same login works on Wikipedia and on Wikimedia Commons, where the photos live.
2. Visit the VIRL article’s talk page, click Add topic, or respond to mine and share what you know or where a source might be found. The reply tool signs your post for you; in the source editor, end with four tildes (~~~~).
3. If anything confuses you, the Teahouse is Wikipedia’s friendly help desk for new editors, and nobody there will judge you for asking.

Photograph your branch

• Canada’s copyright law includes a “freedom of panorama” exception for buildings, sculptures, and other three-dimensional works in public places, so a photo of your branch from the sidewalk is fair game. Murals, posters, and other flat artwork aren’t covered, so they can sit in the background but shouldn’t be the subject. (Commons’ notes on Canada have the details.)
• Ask staff before taking photos inside, and keep patrons, especially kids, out of frame.
• Daylight, a straight-on shot of the entrance, and a wider angle that shows the building in its surroundings are the most useful.
• Upload through the Upload Wizard, choose “This file is my own work”, keep the default CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, and give it a descriptive name such as “Vancouver Island Regional Library - Sooke Branch - Exterior - 2026.jpg”. Add the branch, town, and date to the description.
• Paste the link to your photo on the talk page so an editor can place it. Uploading doesn’t guarantee a spot in the article, but it does guarantee the photo is there for anyone who needs it.
• Older photos get complicated fast, since copyright depends on who took them and when. Stick to photos you took yourself, or ask at the Commons Help desk before uploading anything else.

Dig up sources

• Wikipedia runs on published, verifiable sources, so a memory can’t be cited directly, but it can point to things that can: newspaper articles, anniversary booklets, municipal council minutes, and VIRL’s own annual reports and financial plans.
• Your VIRL card gets you into ProQuest’s BC Historical Newspapers, with the Times Colonist going back to 1884, which means the library hands you the very archive you need to write the library’s history.
• Post what you find on the talk page with the title, publication, date, and page number, and someone (probably me) will happily work it in.

Save the paperwork

• Found a VIRL report, plan, or PDF online? Paste its address into the Internet Archive’s Save Page Now. It takes about ten seconds and might save some future editor a week of digging.

Edit the article yourself

• Skim the five pillars first. The short version is a neutral tone, reliable sources, no original research, and civility.
• Wikipedia wants a description of what VIRL does rather than how wonderful it is, so save the gushing for your own blog, like I do.
• Small, well-sourced edits with a clear edit summary are the easiest for other editors to review and the least likely to be reverted.

If you work for VIRL

Wikipedia asks anyone with a conflict of interest, which includes staff writing about their employer, to disclose it on their user page and to suggest changes on the talk page instead of editing the article directly. Editors are generally happy to help, and your knowledge is exactly what the article needs. Photos that belong to VIRL, rather than to the person who took them, need a short permission email from someone authorized to release them, which the Commons VRT release generator walks you through. I’ve put together a short step-by-step guide for exactly that process, and I’m happy to share it with anyone who asks.

See you on the talk page, and bring a camera.