Books, bongo drums, and iPads: Behind the scenes at Cork City Library
Children’s librarian Clare Doyle and music librarian Margaret O’Sullivan outside Cork City Library on Grand Parade. Picture: Chani Anderson
Right in the heart of the city, Cork City Library first opened its doors at its current location on Grand Parade in 1930. The unassuming building is home to around 120 staff.
In the middle of bustling Cork city, the library is a quiet haven. As soon as you step through the doors, the atmosphere noticeably changes. Before the library opened its doors at 10am, a group of people had gathered outside.
For them, and for so many people, the library is a safe and welcoming space. “For people who are new to the city, we’re often the first place they come to. They may be looking for information, English lessons, or just to sit a while,” says Eibhlín Cassidy, acting city librarian.
In 2025, almost one million people walked through the doors of the city’s 10 libraries. “That equates to around 4.5 visits per head of population in Cork city,” says Cassidy, who also heads up the library’s collections and digital strategy.
Cork City Council recently purchased the Counting House on South Main Street with plans afoot to move the City Library to the former Beamish & Crawford brewery site, but that project is years away from completion.
A lover of physical books, Cassidy is forever conscious of finding the balance between the tactile world of books and the wholesale access of the digital world.
“We're trying to balance moving into that digital space, while retaining the physical presence, and that's reflected in our services and our collections. Our core collections are still physical, and there still is a huge appetite among people coming through our doors for physical items. Being able to put a physical book and the magic of that into the hands of a child, rather than a screen is so important.
“But then you do have people, for different reasons, who either want to or need to access information or resources or reading material in a digital context, so it's about balancing that.”
There are four strands to the library’s digital strategy: keeping physical collections at the core but growing digital access; providing free e services (BorrowBox, learning, languages, digitised archives); helping to build digital and media literacy so people can use those services; and treating the online offering as “a virtual branch” that’s open and free, mirroring the ethos of the physical library.
Relatively new to her post, senior executive librarian Angela Hannon arrived a few months ago from Hollyhill Library. She oversees the libraries’ event programming, a busy job when you consider the service ran 4,366 events last year, with almost 65,000 attendees.
It’s a year round events calendar, anchored to local and national festivals like Seachtain na Gaeilge, Cork World Book Festival and Culture Night, that covers the different departments – music, children’s and young people, and the branches.
Underpinning it all is a clear mission, says Hannon. “The city library is very accessible. The idea is that we're in the heart of communities, we're reaching as many people as we can, we're open to everyone, and we want our events and our programming to reflect all of that."
From talks and music events to exhibitions “our calendar is full”, to clubs and one-off workshops, the programming is as vibrant and relevant as you can imagine, hitting themes and cultural touchpoints. Local history and global justice projects, musical icons like Rory Gallagher and historically important events like Chernobyl are all marked throughout the year. Hannon also produces a bi-monthly events guide that’s available in all the city libraries and on the library website.
Margaret O’Sullivan presides over the Rory Gallagher Music Library where people can take home everything from CDs and vinyl to keyboards and ukeleles. In all, there are well over 100 musical instruments.
“All of the instruments, you won't believe it, they've not cost us one cent, because they're all donated. People very generously keep coming to us with instruments they're not using at home,” says O’Sullivan. “If anybody wants to donate more instruments we’d be delighted, because as I speak, there is not a single guitar sitting upstairs!”
All the musical instruments are provided free of charge for library members, who can rent them for three weeks at a time. “You can renew that five times, provided nobody else is looking for that particular instrument, so you get a good run at it,” says O’Sullivan.
Guitars and ukeleles are among the more popular instruments for rent, with violins and keyboards also in demand. “We also have bongo drums,” laughs O’Sullivan.
As well as instrument lending, the library also provides music and singing lessons free of charge across the 10 city libraries. The instruments in the library are used to support those lessons too.
But the music library isn’t only about renting musical instruments. It also houses a huge collection of music CDs and vinyl, which O’Sullivan is charged with keeping up to date. With an emphasis on sustainability and shopping local, she says she sources the music catalogue from local shops.
“We spend all our money locally. Music Zone, Golden Discs and Vinyl Bunker are where we usually go for stock.”
Library members can rent up to 12 items at a time, with stock going out all over the country. That’s because the Rory Gallagher Music Library is one of only two public music libraries in the country (the other is in the Ilac Centre Library in Dublin).
“We serve the whole country for music. We’ve got one gentleman from Donegal who, come the summer now, will travel down on the bus every Thursday to borrow his CDs. He comes down specifically to stock up.”
O’Sullivan says the music library also plays an important role in preserving Irish music. “We have a huge store of Irish vinyl music, including a Joan Denise Moriarty collection, a Fleischman collection, a Rory Gallagher collection, an Opera House collection and a Choral Society collection.”
The library is currently working at digitising all of these vinyl and CD musical archives and adding them to the library’s systems “for posterity”.
Preserving our musical heritage and providing access to music and the ability to play music - these are services we can see, but what I discovered when speaking to the Cork City Library team is the often-unheralded work they do for the community. Like the Memory Box service, which came about after staff members noticed people coming into the library looking for music for elderly relatives who were experiencing dementia or memory loss.
Inside each Memory Box is 15 CDs of music throughout the years from AC/DC to opera to Tina Turner, 30 pictures of old Cork (from the and the John Barry Archive), a DVD of a concert, four books, and a dementia-friendly jigsaw. The boxes are delivered each month to all the nursing homes around the city free of charge.
You can tell that O’Sullivan loves her job. “I’ve been 34 years at the library service, and three years in the Rory Gallagher Music Library, and I absolutely love it. Every day coming to work is pleasure. I look forward to it. It’s not so much a job as a way of life.”
O’Sullivan, originally from Donoughmore in County Cork, but living in Barrack Street now, says she’s facing retirement in three years’ time. “I don’t know how I’m going to cope,” she laughs, “and that’s the truth!”
Clare Doyle from Douglas began her role as Children’s Librarian in 2022. At that time when the world was still scrambling to deal with the aftermath of covid, there were just 31,500 visitors across all the Cork City Libraries.
Doyle says the library needed to “reassess its role” for children and young people in a post-covid world. In consultation with librarians across the service, the team put its focus on collection development and “high-quality programming”, which centres on the four seasonal themes of Spring into Storytime, Summer Reading Challenge, My Little Library Bag, and Family Time.
Creating a library where children and young people want to visit and which fosters a love of reading isn’t as simple as just buying the latest books. Doyle says her department engages with a teen committee to help expand the library’s collections and put on the type of events young people want to attend.
“We had a very active teen committee last year, but they’re moving on into fifth year now so we’re looking or new members.” The teen committee organised events during the year, including a hugely successful poetry competition. “They did everything from devising posters and themes to buying prizes and judging. We were thrilled with that.”
When purchasing books for children and young people, Doyle says her predecessor gave her a valuable piece of advice. “Remember who you’re buying for.”
“Publishing houses will be very lively in their pushing of ‘the next best thing’ - that's their job. But as well as the fun, sparkly element, we have an obligation to purchase for the disadvantaged, and for those with intellectual disabilities too."
Doyle mentions an exhibition in the children's library in April 2026 of its Barrington Stokes novels, which are dyslexia friendly. The library’s World Book Festival Kids and Teens 2025 program also included an author with dyslexia, Christina Neeri.
“It’s important that children see themselves reflected in the stories they read so we’re actively trying to ensure our collection is diverse and inclusive.” Doyle also wants to make the children’s library a safe space. She calls it the “third space” after home and school; somewhere safe for kids to “just sit and be”.
Like her other team members, Doyle oozes enthusiasm and passion for the job. In fact, what’s became clear in the hour and a half I spend in the library is that these librarians don’t see their work as a job, but rather a vocation.
Hannon summed it up perfectly. “We see our role as quietly empowering people.” Echoed throughout my chats with the librarians is that they see the library as “the heart of the community”, a public space where events, books, music all work together to support reading, literacy, learning and cultural life.
There’s a radical simplicity to libraries that Hannon and her fellow librarians are working so hard to maintain. The idea that this is a space where “nobody bothers you. You don’t have to justify being there. You’re not under pressure to buy anything or perform, you can just sit, read, look at an exhibition or listen, and leave a little more informed or inspired.” As Cassidy succinctly says, “When describing the library I don't like saying ‘we’re not just books’ because that almost implies that the books aren’t enough. So instead, I say ‘we’re books and so much more’.”
BorrowBox is a free digital library service and mobile app where members can borrow and download ebooks, e-audiobooks, e-press (includes magazines and newspapers).
Cork City Libraries has a collection of 48,677 ebooks, e-audiobooks and e-press.
In 2025, there were 181,009 digital loans via BorrowBox of ebooks, e-audiobooks and e comics combined.
E-audiobooks are by far the most popular format of ebook, says Cassidy. “We do have physical audio books, which still get borrowed, but we’re seeing that shift now in the way people like to listen to audiobooks.”
Cassidy says the Cork public love BorrowBox. “We regularly feature high up in the per-head-of-population using BorrowBox nationally.”
