After 45 years of dedicated service to the Island’s bookworm community, librarian Joan Vidale has retired from the Bermuda National Library.The Royal Gazette met Ms Vidale on her last day as Outreach Assistant at the Bermuda National Library to reflect back on her long career. Ms Vidale, 64, first started at the library when she was aged 19 as a junior assistant. She held this position for several years as she had a family of six children to raise.“I worked here not really as a career, at first, but because I had to work,” she said. “It was a viable and necessary job.”But as the years went by she fell in love with her job. She remembered that one of the first books she read at the library was ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ by Betty Smith. This book, now considered a classic, is about a young girl growing up in turn of the century Brooklyn in a family struggling financially to make ends meet. Ms Vidale was greatly inspired by the book.“Eventually, I was on the huge mobile library for a few years,” she said. “When that stopped, we came up with an idea of an outreach programme for senior citizens.”Her title upon retirement was ‘Outreach Assistant’. For the last four years she was dedicated to the literary needs of Bermuda’s older population. She had a van and would make house calls.“I made friends with a lot of wonderful people,” she said. “I went to some of the homes. They are not all on board yet, but maybe this will expand. I take books to the seniors. Some of them are audio and a lot of them like large print books, because they are easier on the eyes.”She also delivered books to the Co-Ed Facility and the Prison Farm.“It has been an eye opening experience,” she said. “I know it is a cliché, but our seniors have made their contributions and they are a wealth of information. You ask them a question or say something to them and they can reel off stuff to you. Their memories are wonderful. I hope when I get into my seventies and eighties I will be able to recant and share like they do.”Ms Vidale would often tried to cater to the specific tastes of the seniors she visited or sometimes would just take them a hodgepodge of different books, depending on their preferences.“The seniors were very happy to see me,” Ms Vidale said. “I have made a lot of friends through this job. In the beginning some of the seniors were a bit sceptical because I was a stranger coming into their home and they thought it was going to cost them something. I had make it clear it was a free service. It was designed to be hassle free for them.”The service has been a lifesaver to many who don’t like to drive into town or those who are housebound and can no longer drive at all.She dealt with about ten seniors and five rest homes. Sometimes she would read to senior citizens in the rest homes, and they enjoyed that a great deal. She had her seniors on alternate week schedule and came to switch books every other week, but often her more avid readers would read their books before their time was up.“I would get calls saying they needed new books,” she said with a laugh. “That was fine. I didn’t mind that at all. I was at their service.“It is easy after a while to please people when you figure out what they like and what they want,” she said. “I am a reader myself. I like mysteries, but I am not too crazy about a lot that are being written right now. They are not Agatha Christie anymore; they are more graphic. Sometimes that gets monotonous. I like biographies. I have a huge pile of biographies that I want to read. I was quite guilty of taking things, checking things out from here. I even got an overdue notice, once.”She said the clients she deals with aren’t that into high technology like the younger crowd, but she knew that the nature of libraries was changing.“I have heard in meetings and such that the clientele is shifting and we get a lot of people in here to use the Wi-Fi and the internet,” she said. “Even after hours you can see people crowded around outside using the Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, we don’t have a way to keep count of how huge that usage is. As for Kindles, we have our diehard hardback readers. They are not going anywhere. They will probably die out before they give up on books, but a few probably do have Kindles. Technology will probably move the library forward in that direction as well. It is all about economics right now. When and if the tide shifts that is a great possibility that that is the way (electronic books) the library will go to a certain extent, but I am sure there will always be printed material. People like to hold a volume in their hands.”Ms Vidale said she is not that technology minded herself, but has accepted it as much as needed.“There are some things you can not fight against,” she said.She did not yet know who would be replacing her, but she said the library was working on it. She was planning to go home, relax and enjoy life on her own time.“I don’t feel like being a typical ‘going on a cruise’ retiree,” she said. “I will be travelling when I can, but there are things to do, such as my garden and some other projects at home that need to be done. I am going to relax and get myself fit. I am looking forward to it.”