Jane Hermanson and Lesli Barnes sit in folding chairs under a pop-up canopy in a Tagish RV park on a cool early September afternoon. Beside them, the rear hatch and side doors of a minivan are wide open, revealing shelves carrying a healthy selection of adult fiction; children’s picture books; a cookbook co-authored by Dolly Parton; and for movie buffs, more than two dozen DVDs, including Reefer Madness and Die Hard 2. Barnes, in a T-shirt, seems unfazed by the weather and has her eye on a red squirrel rooting through pine needles, but Hermanson shivers in the late-summer breeze even as she swats at bugs and says, “The blackflies are terrible.”
The librarians are outside with this makeshift setup because Tagish’s previous library, a cozy one-room add-on to the community centre, went up in flames with the rest of the building in March 2025. Five fire departments battled the early-morning blaze, which was a devastating blow to the sleepy unincorporated settlement of about 400 people. Even as Hermanson and Barnes processed the news, they felt obligated to make sure the community still had a library.
That summer, unable to find a building that could host them, they stocked Barnes’s spare minivan with material from the Yukon’s 14 other public libraries and a laptop and mobile Wi-Fi stick from the Whitehorse branch. After they set up by community mailboxes on Tagish Road, a few dozen locals dropped by to exchange materials, and curious tourists from Outside occasionally stopped to chat. That spot was booked this year, so the pair persuaded the RV park owner to let them operate from the property three days a week.
When a local woman in an SUV pulls in and her large white dog bounces out, Hermanson and Barnes greet both by name. The pup beelines to the trees while the owner gravitates toward a slightly dated copy of People (“Taylor and Travis: Inside their ‘fairy-tale’ wedding!”). Hermanson prefers Vanity Fair, but she keeps People stocked for anyone who wants to keep up to date on the stars. The woman flips through the pages, but she seems mostly interested in chatting, which suits the librarians just fine.
Hermanson, the head librarian, has always loved books and people—and places where the two come together. She moved from the Yukon to Vancouver as a child in the ’60s and worked in bookstores as a teenager before managing one. After returning to the territory 23 years ago, she held down three jobs but made sure the other schedules worked around her library shifts.
Barnes, who also chairs the Tagish library board, grew up in Victoria without a TV and got a library card as soon as she could print her name. Like many public libraries, the one in Tagish served not just as a place for people to borrow books or use free Wi-Fi but also as a social cornerstone. Teens had a safe space to hang out and seniors could chat over $1 coffees while printing Sudoku puzzles. “A library is accessible to everybody,” she says, “every single person, and sometimes their dogs and cats.”
By late September, it’s too cold to keep the mobile unit going, which leaves residents without a local library during the long winter. The nearest one is 30 kilometres away in Carcross. Hermanson hopes to have a new permanent library soon, but the Tagish Community Association is still sorting out plans to re-build the community centre.
Until then, she’s determined to keep the spirit of the library alive, even if it is mobile and seasonal, so it won’t be forgotten. “If it disappears for a year, I think that it will continue in that direction and I don’t want that to happen,” she says. “I think it’s important that we have a library in our community.”
