28.3°C Mainly Sunny 
I am sitting behind the circulation desk at Whistler Canada Olympic House, watching the final run of the four-man bobsleigh on the big screen with one eye, and thinking about how wonderful this has all been. I’m also thinking about how much I’m looking forward to getting this place back to its normal life as a library. The week after the Games is a big week for us, dismantling the new equipment, furniture and systems and reinstalling the shelves and the collection.
On Monday (March 1), the temporary walls that have enclosed most of the collection were to have been removed, the rest of the shelves were to be delivered and the installers were to start putting them together.
Then today (March 4), the books will come in and our work really starts. While the movers will be the ones actually replacing the books on the shelves, library staff will be making sure they are in the correct order. We also plan to do an inventory of our materials so that they are in great shape for you on Monday (March 8).
We will be operating with normal hours, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., from Monday to Thursday, March 11. We’ll be open Friday, Saturday and Sunday, March 12 to 14 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., as well as Tuesday, March 16, and Thursday, March 18. On Monday, March 15 and Wednesday, March 17, the hours will be 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. On Saturday, March 20, we will be closed; and from Sunday, March 21 we will resume our normal hours.
These early closings and the one Saturday closure are to accommodate the Canadian Paralympic Committee in providing services and events for the Paralympics. The library will continue to look a little different, with a few of the shelves still not in place and some different furniture and decoration, but we very much wanted to reopen with library services to the public, even on a slightly reduced scale.
I want to express my appreciation to the Canadian Olympic Committee, the Resort Municipality of Whistler, the governments of Canada and British Columbia, and their workers and volunteers: everyone who participated in the Whistler Canada Olympic House. The library staff has been incredibly flexible and has performed far beyond the capacity of “normal” library workers; and of course the entire community of Whistler library users has been generous and patient with us as we took on this amazing, overwhelming, difficult, and fantastic enterprise. I thank you all, and I will see you on Monday!
Lauren Stara is director of the Whistler Public Library.
