2021-03-12 SPLAT Curiosity Report: Volume 7, Issue 9

Featured Story

Our library in the context of a tumultuous period in history

This has been an extraordinarily challenging time for all of us.  The global pandemic has upended all aspects of our lives.  All of us have made sacrifices, and yet we are faced with huge economic impacts, tens of thousands of people each day falling ill, and fortunately most, but not all recovering from their illness.  But in the face of this tragedy, we have bravely, carefully, cleverly come up with an entirely new model to serve our patrons.  

In those uncertain days back in March 2020, after it became clear that, for the safety of our community, we would need to close our doors, we quickly got to work from our improvised home offices.  With great flexibility, we learned to leverage technology, both familiar and new to connect, organize and plan.  We learned how to navigate copyright law, file sharing, video editing, and so many zoom meetings to provide programs for our community in new ways.  Some of us used our crafting skills and 3d printing expertise to create personal protective equipment, which had suddenly become impossible to purchase, and distributed it to medical professionals, long-term care facilities, community members on the front lines, and to our coworkers to keep each other safer.  We quickly wrote new procedures, based on the most up to date science that became a model of best practices for serving our community safely.  We pivoted in our collection development spending, investing heavily in downloadable resources to put materials into the hands of patrons who were instructed to stay at home as much as possible.  We increased the hours and reach of our wireless networks to provide more access to the public outside of our facilities.  We introduced new services such as curbside pick up, home delivery, personal shopping, chat, and home-bound check ins to serve our communities while seeking to keep staff and patrons safe.  We planned an impressive and diverse calendar of valuable virtual events for all ages.  We hosted kindergarten readiness classes for parents of young children enriched with incredible educational materials for families.  We created a new learn at home gear collection to support families with preschool aged children who are not able to attend school.  We provided safe venues for polling stations during the local elections in May and again in November’s presidential election.  You should feel proud of the good work that you have done .

One of the reasons that we are able to catalogue all of these successes is that we were constantly looking for ways to adapt and make improvements.  There is still plenty of opportunity to better serve our community, and I would like to make some suggestions for areas in which we might focus our efforts in the months to come.  

Families educating their children from home are struggling with the challenges that this brings.  We are well positioned to assist these families, but it will take creativity and networking to identify the right projects to undertake to best serve their needs.  The government’s response to mitigate the economic effects of the pandemic will continue to require interpretation for citizens to take advantage of new programs for individuals and businesses.  The library, as a source of information, can definitely help our community members to navigate these programs, but it will require us to quickly interpret news as it emerges, and to synthesize and share information in a clear manner that will be useful for our patrons.  With an increased reliance on technology to connect with each other and with resources at this time, there is a huge opportunity to employ strategies to reduce historical, institutional and structural barriers to accessing information and communication technology to improve digital inclusion.  Lastly, we have developed some highly skilled virtual programmers.  With in person programming likely to be one of the last of our services to return to normal, we have an opportunity to invest in media production capabilities for more professional looking virtual programming.

But the pandemic was not the only global event, contributing an air of uncertainty to 2020.  Social justice demonstrations took place around the world that summer, asserting that black lives matter.  Ada Community Library responded promptly and smartly on social media, by posting book lists of anti-racist works from our collection (holds queues on those items skyrocketed).  This was no sudden awakening for us, though.  Our library has long demonstrated that we are an organization that places a high value on diversity, equity, and inclusion.  As staff we engage in difficult discussions about race, class, and privilege with candor and boldness so that we may be more understanding of, and welcoming to all people in our community.  We conscientiously work to ensure that our collections reflect the diversity of political thought, religious belief or non-belief, with characters and creators who are neurodivergent, or who live on the other side of the globe, so that borrowers can see their experiences reflected or so that they may explore the experiences of a person who is unlike them in some way.  We seek to build a team of colleagues of different ages and ethnic backgrounds, genders and gender identities so that we demonstrate that our libraries are places for everyone.

So, where do we go from here?  The future is uncertain, but all indications are that this pandemic will end and that we will be less vulnerable at some point in the year ahead.  Flexibility will remain an important trait as we navigate the changing conditions in the months to come.  We will continue to build on our successes and pivot from strategies that did not yield the results that we wished for.  I firmly believe that we will be able to say as we look back on this time that we stepped up to the responsibility of being public servants and that we did valuable work that aided our community during this challenging time.
– Guest post from Alex Hartman, via Eric Hovey

Fail Forward

We’ve all been there. You pour your heart into a program, and no one shows up. You try something new, and you fall on your face. Sound familiar? Fail Forward is the place to share your failures, and give you the opportunity to share what you learned from them. Did you promote your program in a different way after no one showed up? Maybe you took a new approach to the new thing you were excited about? Awesome! Share your story via our online form so others can learn, and realize that failure is often part of the process.

Workshops in 2020

The fall of 2020, we offered the same workshop series we offered fall of 2019. Last fall, I wrote a Fail Forward about the challenges of offering snacks at events. That was not a challenge in 2020, since everything was online! This year, the challenge is that as participants began to realize that we were recording the workshops and send the links out via email, they stopped attending the workshop while we were recording it. Now, it seems that people watch the workshops a week or two later on YouTube. This makes complete sense, but it also means that we’re going to have to come up with a new way to assess the success of the series. We can look at how many YouTube views a recording has, but when is the cutoff? What defines a successful event during the pandemic? There are more questions than answers, but it’s a good reminder to stay flexible and think broadly about how to assess library services, especially this year.
– Jessica Martinez

Is there a library you follow on social media who is always doing new and exciting things? How about a blog you follow that inspires you? What about a new idea, book, or resource that you want to share? Library Crush Corner is a place for those working in Idaho libraries to share what inspires them, and who or what they’re crushing on… in a professional sense. Share your story via our online form so we can publish it in a future issue!

Kuna Library Virtual Storytime

I am crushing on Kuna Library Virtual Storytime. Miss Claudia and Mr. Johnny both do an amazing job transferring their excitement and enthusiasm through the videos. The books they choose seem to be ones that will fly off the shelves. It is great that their love of storytelling keeps going during the pandemic. It feels like they are having a conversation with you about the book they are reading. They offer great crafts! Keep up the great work. Check them out on the Kuna Library Facebook page.
– Eric Hovey

SPLAT explores the ever-evolving library world and supports library folks as they adapt to meet the needs of their communities. Library folk throughout the state of Idaho volunteer to serve on the Special Projects Library Action Team (SPLAT). Learn more about SPLAT at splat.lili.org

SPLAT is brought to you by the Idaho Commission for Libraries and was made possible, in part, by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LS-246156-OLS-20). The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.