The St Kilda Community Library has been a fixture of the local area for 110 years.
However, in July, they will shut with the opening of the new South Dunedin Library and Community Complex.
"It’s a sad, sad time, but the new library will be a good thing," St Kilda Community Library committee member Helen Parry said.
The library has been run and kept open by volunteers since its inception.
Ms Parry has been volunteering with the library for 27 years. She said the library had served as a place where the local residents could come for a friendly chat, rather than solely to pick up some reading material.
"The customers have been saying how sad they are that the library is closing ... but we encourage them to go to the new library. I think everyone will get used to it."
The library is completely offline and was thought to be the last of its kind in the area.
Digitisation was ruled out years ago due to almost all of the volunteers being "rather elderly", Ms Parry said.
Volunteers still operated a card index system, with members’ names, addresses, contact details and the books they have written on a card.
The list of books they have in stock is stored in a small filing cabinet, ordered by authors’ last names.
However, this system was not without its flaws.
Ms Parry said that sometime in the 1950s, a volunteer named D.G. Winton broke tradition and started filing authors by first and last name, instead of the standard last and first name.
The "Winton way" has continued to trip up and confound volunteers since, she said.
The library originally opened in April 6, 1914.
The Evening Star report from the time said the library opened with 27 members, but the number had risen to 37 before the end of the opening night, with 20 more people promising to join in the coming days.
The library had to close in 1919 owing to the outbreak of influenza, and the need to "fumigate books" on account of the outbreak.
St Kilda Community Library convener Wayne Sutherland said it was interesting that just over 100 years later the library again had to close.
"That sort of rung bells with Covid — we closed for a long time because of our elderly population; we decided to be very cautious."
By March 3, 1928, the number of members had reached 106 and the library was stocked with 3294 books.
In 2025, there were countless books in stock, and about 200 active members.
"We stand on the shoulders of giants, because the past volunteers kept this place going through everything ... I really take my hat off to them," Mr Sutherland said.
The library will start to wind down operations until their complete closure on July 31.
Books would all be donated to the Mosgiel Rotary Club for its upcoming book sale and shelves would be divvied up between charities such as the Salvation Army and the Hospice shop.
Large-print books and large-piece puzzles would be sent to any of the community’s rest-homes who wanted them, Mr Sutherland said.
