Baker Lake (May 31/06) - A gala celebration highlighted the official opening of the Nunavut Public Library Services headquarters building in Baker Lake earlier this month.

Petra Mauerhoff is the manager of public library services in Nunavut and looks after the needs of Nunavut's 11 public libraries.

She says the new headquarters is, in reality, a distribution centre which receives new material and ships it to the individual libraries.

In addition to Mauerhoff, the office employs a community-services librarian, systems librarian, technical-services assistant and a receptionist/clerk.

"Headquarters brought five full-time salaries into the community, two of which are local hires," Mauerhoff says.

"Up until 2004, our headquarters were in the Iqaluit library, which is our biggest branch.

"The last services job in Iqaluit was cut in the fall of 2004 and the employee was given the option of relocating to Baker, but she didn't want to move."

Mauerhoff's staff made do with a makeshift office in the main government building in Baker while they waited for their new facility to be completed.

She said because the new office is not a public building, her staff doesn't interact much with the community.

"My work is all administrative, so I don't deal with the public at all.

"But my community-services librarian, Taryl Gula, travels to the communities to help out at the local libraries, so he gets to interact with the public at times.

"The travel provides him with the opportunity to receive feedback and see what goes on at the local level."

Mauerhoff said she and her staff didn't receive a lot of advance notice on the grand opening and had to really scramble to have things ready.

She said the strong turnout at the event came as a big surprise to the whole staff.

"We had a lot of help from the community in having the building nicely decorated for the event.

"The heritage centre was kind enough to loan us some art for our walls and we had some items from a project at the local public library we used to put up a little display.

"I was quite proud to see smiles on everyone's faces during the opening."