The Salt Spring Island Public Library installs Montel systems to carefully preserve its rare, unique, and fragile books, bound paper documents, films, materials, and archives in their care.
Nestled up against the east side of Vancouver Island, Salt Spring Island in British Colombia is the jewel of the Southern Gulf Islands. Renowned for its creativity, Salt Spring Island has a population of about 10,500 and is known as one of North America’s best small art towns. The new Salt Spring Island Public Library building, which would serve the community for decades to come in an invigorating and inviting place, needed to carefully preserve the rare books, bound paper documents, film collections and archives in their care.

Effectively designed and space planned by Ladi Holovsky of Chang Holovsky Ltd (Sidney, BC), the Salt Spring Island Public Library and Archives would respond to the determined needs of its Salt Spring Island service population by providing books, periodicals, and other form of media for educational, informational, and recreational purposes. Taking into account all of the issues that could affect its use in the future, incorporating adaptability and flexibility in the design and space planning would be essential. For the archives and records storage needs, the public library wanted a working environment that would be safe, secure, healthy, comfortable, durable, aesthetically pleasing, and be accessible.
To reflect the ever-changing needs and interest of the public library community, Montel proposed its customized library and archival shelving and high-density storage solution. To meet the Salt Spring Island Public Library and Archives budgets, functional and special space needs, for its collection space, Montel’s library solution would allow additional space for future growth and expansion.
To help optimize space and better serve this new public library building, Montel provided the following customized mobile and static library and archival storage systems: