The Covid-19 stay-at-home policy is about to end in many states. Let’s share what we are finding on how to handle reopening libraries whenever that comes our way: preparing the collection? Promotion? Communicating with our congregations? What else do we need to consider?
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I've also heard a lot of mis-information- Because things are moving so fast around the world, there is also information that is old news. I think I will quarantine for 7 days- Sunday to Sunday, charge no fines, and pre-order. That's what I'm thinking currently. I'm going to listen to the webinar this morning.
Wow- someone who appears to know what he is talking about. That's very refreshing. I'm going to listen to the webinar while I iron tomorrow.
What webinar are you referring to? I am new to this network.
The article that Martha is referring to here mentions a webinar in the article I posted on the 19th.
COVID-19 & Libraries: Your Questions Answered
look up in your feed to May 19th- Covid-19 and Libraries. The person doing the webinar is practical in his advice- He is both a pediatrician, and has a degree and experience in library science. Good combo. I felt better immediately.
Missouri relaxed restrictions today (May 4) and our church will be holding worship services beginning May 10 with social distancing and projecting to other rooms for overflow from the the reduced capacity of the worship center.
The library will begin Carry-Out. Books returned to the bookdrop will be quarantined for one week before reshelving. Librarians will bag media that was reserved from our OPAC online. Bags with names will be available for pickup at our church's Welcome Center. Patrons will not be allowed in the library. In searching for the lifespan of the Covid 19 virus on paper, we have found that there is no established time limit. It could be hours to days.
This has required us to put together video tutorials on the features of the OPAC. It also requires that patrons email us requesting a username and password to establish an account on OPAC.
We are Atriuum users.
A link to our first tutorial:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=16_Z2fhtf1EJpHNHIpM569Wx4HEeI7eho
The CDC said 24 hours should be plenty of time to quarantine paper materials, as it does not live long on paper and is very low risk to transmit the virus by handling materials.
https://www.imls.gov/webinars/mitigating-covid-19-when-managing-pap...
https://youtu.be/iuuczmz4BR0
https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files//webinar/transcripts/covid...
As for our library, it is also a conference room/Sunday School room and always open, not monitored by staff. Apart from signs to notify patrons, I have no way to monitor materials coming in and out. It will have to be the honor system.
Bit off topic but my most reliable and I have been using this time to do some weeding of books and other housekeeping tend to put off. Today we each took home a reusable shopping bag to put in our recycle barrels at home. Why? Because in the past when tried to weed or were given unusable materials and we put them in the church dumpster they came back with a know you didn't mean to toss this!
Don't worry we only toss what we know can't exchange with other library or take to used bookstore Most of it was old Bible studies that had been written in and had been put in by a previous librarian more than 10 yr ago
That's one of the ideas I thought of too. By appointment only- one of the previous posts said that.
These are very rough thoughts, but what I'm thinking about is pre-orders like for take-out. LIked the idea of the cart, but there's still a lot of touching. Our library is horse-shoe shaped so that cancels out social distancing. I like the idea of making an appointment. We have web opac so people could e-mail the librarian (we have our own e-mail address), and say they wanted books on this or that, and we could pull them or they could accept a grab bag? I'm wondering about requiring masks in the library, and only allowing one person per family by appointment. To tell you the truth, I'm a little nervous about it all, and plan to ask people to wipe down the books before returning or if they cannot, we will need to provided we can find wipes or a rag and some Lysol spray. I'm just thinking out loud, and would appreciate any holes plugged or pointed out. Still mulling it over.
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