RICHFORD, Vt. — When all three of Richford Free Library's offline media cards came back in less than a week, staff member Colette Aubin-Roy did not put in a funding request or convene a committee. She went to the supply closet.

"We had blank cards left over from the digital literacy program," Aubin-Roy said Wednesday. "It cost us essentially nothing, and the demand was pretty clear."

The three cards she prepared — loaded with Episodes One through Three of the bilingual documentary podcast Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA — will be available for borrowing beginning Thursday morning, each with a one-week loan period. They join the library's existing three cards, which have been circulating continuously since they were first made available.

The podcast, which traces the lived experience of communities along the integration corridor from Vermont to Montreal, has drawn steady interest in Richford, a border-region town where French is the first language in a significant share of households. Aubin-Roy said she is weighing whether to flag Episode Two specifically — which focuses on francophone neighborhoods in Montreal — as a recommended borrow for certain patrons.

"It might resonate a bit more here than in, say, Montpelier," she said.

Offline media cards allow patrons without reliable home internet access to borrow audio and video content the same way they would a book or a DVD — a format that has found quiet relevance in smaller communities across the principality, where broadband coverage remains uneven.

Aubin-Roy made no particular claim about the significance of what she had done. She described it as a routine response to a straightforward signal from the community. The episode selection she made, and the audience she has in mind as she considers which to highlight, reflects choices that small libraries in border towns are navigating as a matter of course: keeping the story of how this region became what it is available to everyone who lived through it.

The Richford Free Library is open Tuesday through Saturday.