A New Time for Dare County Library
From 1964 to Today
In 1941, North Carolina introduced the State Aid to Public Libraries Act which provides grants to counties that support a public library, the idea being that many NC counties are rural with small tax bases and need help carrying the cost of buildings, collections, and salaries. Additionally, if there are counties in extremely rural areas, they are permitted to join together and pool their annual State Aid funds to form regional library systems.
The East Albemarle Regional Library (EARL) System was formed in 1964, consisting of Camden, Currituck, Dare, and Pasquotank Counties, headed by a single Library Director and four County Librarians, as well as a handful of additional support staff. While consisting of eight branch locations, EARL is a single library system that shares almost all of our materials throughout our four counties.
Fast-forward 60 years and a lot has changed in our northeast corner of North Carolina; our four counties are no longer rural and our populations are large enough to fund individual County Library systems. The State Aid that once supported eight employees to run the EARL system is now down to four County Librarians, one who does the additional duties of the Regional Library Director.
After much discussion, debate, and an examination of how State Aid funds are currently spent to keep EARL operating versus how those funds could be going to our individual counties, our four county Boards of Commissioners adopted resolutions in the spring of 2024 agreeing to dissolve the East Albemarle Regional Library System on June 30, 2026, and return all funding and library governance to each respective county.
What This Means for You
By dissolving EARL, Dare County Library will now be under the direction and supervision of a Library Director and the annual State Aid to Public Libraries grant will go directly to support your county.
The shared collection of materials that are housed across our four counties will remain where they are; however, we will move from the online catalog that we currently share onto a state-wide catalog called NC Cardinal.
You will still be able to cross county lines to Currituck, Camden, Dare, and Pasquotank to check out and return books - but now, if you’re visiting any county in the NC Cardinal system, you can check out or return books there as well.
Interlibrary Loans, EARL, and NC Cardinal
When one of our four EARL member counties does not have an item in their collection, we have offered a service called Interlibrary Loan to borrow books outside of our regional system. If you have used Interlibrary Loan, or ILL, then you are familiar with the process of requesting books, having them mailed to your home library, and paying a $2.00 fee to help offset the cost of shipping.
The EARL catalog currently offers around 134,000 items - it sounds like a lot but the ILL service helps us fill in gaps in our collection, like that series you started and loved but we only had the first three out of 27 books by the author. Using ILL, we have been able to order the rest of the books from libraries outside of EARL for you.
Once we have transitioned to NC Cardinal, you will have access to over 8 million library items, without paying additional fees. With this in mind, we anticipate the need to fill traditional ILL requests will be almost completely eliminated. Therefore, starting May 1, 2026, we will no longer take ILL requests.
Looking Ahead
Over the next few months, you will receive a monthly email sharing information about how this move may change any of our services and impact you as a patron.
Those emails will address:
- NC Cardinal in more depth
- Your account, cards, and online resource accesses
- Changeover information from our current online catalog to NC Cardinal
- Library closures and downtime during our changeover
- Changes to our courier system, how books will be moved around, and timing
The Bottom Line
Everyone at the East Albemarle Regional Library is committed to making this transition as smooth as possible and minimizing any disruption to your library experience. As we move through this process, there will be a short adjustment period before all the new benefits are fully available. We appreciate your patience as we work through this unprecedented change—one designed to better serve our communities.
Thank you and please feel free to reach out to us with any questions, comments, and concerns.
Meaghan Leenaarts Beasley, Dare County Library
Melissa Futrell, Interim Currituck County Librarian
Kim Perry, Pasquotank Librarian, East Albemarle Regional Library Director
Rodney Wooten, Camden County Librarian
