Back to Albury Library ...

 Over the last few years I've written about the role public libraries play in the life of an independent researcher, providing tables, desk and free wifi, as places to work, or simply as a place to read your email and upload data at the end of the day.

So, today I was having our car serviced. 

As it's a reasonably new car with all the electronic geegaws that come with that, it had to go back to the dealer to be serviced. 

The dealership's workshop is in Wodonga and they offered to drop me in Albury city centre.

Well, I'd intended to do some more work on Louisa Crow.

I could have decided to work in Wodonga Library, which is excellent as regards facilities, but doesn't open until 10.00, and it was 0845 on a cold damp morning after a night of biblical quantities of rain.

Wodonga doesn't have that much in the way of coffee shops with wifi where you can work, so I took up the dealership's offer of a ride to Albury city centre.

By the time they dropped me off, Canvas, the cafe attached to MaMa was open for coffee, so I treated myself to an early morning tea and sat at one of the tables using MaMa's free wifi doing the preliminary research on Trove.

Like Wodonga Library, Albury Library doesn't open until 10.00, but by the time I'd had a coffee and walked around checking where the bus stops were - there's a direct bus from outside of MaMa to Wodonga centre that goes past the dealership, the library was open.

The open plan work area was much as I remember it from when I last used the Library extensively in 2017 - the public access computers have changed, and are arranged differently, and there's now a couple of bookable quiet rooms, which can be used for conference calls, but there's still a number of large work tables, some of which are located conveniently close to power sockets, incluidng USB sockets if you need to charge a phone or tablet.

Wifi is provided as part of Albury Wodonga's joint free public wifi service, as at MaMa and Wodonga public library - it's not the fastest wifi service on the planet, but testing using Ookla's web client gave me something like 25Mbps for both upload and download, which is not unreasonable and more than adequate for an hour or two's web based research (and good enough to let me re-install Evernote, after I found that the version installed on my computer was hopelessly behind the current release).

Basically it provides all that you need, and on a cold wet Tuesday provided a useful haven for an hour or two while I researched Louisa Crow...