Sunday, July 12, 2020

This week at the library; or, Week 17 of the pandemic

This week we are reintegrating our two teams of staff. Several staff are on vacation, it is (in my opinion) miserably hot, and I am continuing to work on plans for the fall. I'm just tired. A gazillion little things went wrong and I'm tired.

One of my staff is delivering summer reading materials and Lego activity bags at food service, as well as taking materials out to one of our daycares. I've got another person working on translating my rough draft into a survey on storytimes for the fall and sorting the huge donation of snap circuits (almost 20 kits!) we got from a local science organization, GLAS. We're all working on keeping up with activity bags and storytime bundles.

I'm continuing to update and improve my plan for the fall. It won't be complete probably until it IS fall - for one thing, the school district is not making any definite decisions until August 1 - but I am trying to be prepared as possible. Part of that also includes a different kind of schedule for weekly programming. I'm also slowly but surely working on the children's and teen areas to prepare for re-opening them. I've already removed all the STEAM labs and toys, but there are things that need to be shifted for safety for the staff and other things to work on. I'm also continuing to add to our handouts, activity packs, and storytime bundles.

Sometimes when I'm tired I can't concentrate on anything, so I've also done a lot of work on updating our spreadsheets of easy reader levels, lexiles, and cleaning out various folders and files.

Incidentally, our basement is not one of those nice, cool basements. It's 80-90 degrees and correspondingly humid. The good news is, after it flooded, the city guys hauled off all the trash and recycling so we didn't have to lug it up the stairs! They also disposed of the dead bats so I didn't have to do it this time!

Schedule
(I'm also working from home the days I'm at the library, just not the whole day)
  • Monday
    • 12-7 at library (cleaning basement and doing the bills)
  • Tuesday
    • 12-5 at library
  • Wednesday
    • Work from home
  • Thursday
    • 12-5 at library (the basement flooded. oh joy. good thing I cleaned it on Monday)
  • Friday
    • Work from home (or tried to - the storm last night knocked out the power!)
  • Saturday
    • 2-4 at library


2 comments:

Ms. Yingling said...

If Legos and snap circuits in the library freaked me out BEFORE the pandemic, now the very thought of having them in a maker space in the library makes e want to shower in Lysol. Sorry you had a bit, humid week. Hope this week will be cooler and more pleasantly productive.

Jennifer said...

A lot of things with a ton of small pieces I never intended to circulate. But things change... I've tried to publicize the lengthy process of (ha ha) processing the circulating stuff, and most people understand, but there's always those few...
- First, our cataloger catalogs all the stuff.
- Then I list it on my Read 'n' Play blog so I can easily replace pieces etc.
- Add it to the inventory
- Add it to Pinterest
- Then it can go out.
After it's first circulation, and going on after that, when it's returned it
- Goes into quarantine for three days
- Then it comes to me and is checked out to youth services. We spread all the pieces out, spray with disinfectant (if possible) wash fabric etc. (if possible) and let it sit for another three days.
- Then we have to collect it all up, replace missing pieces, refill consumable supplies, and send it out again.
Some things, like Magnatiles, we're not counting. We're just hoping most of them come back. Some things I've put away for the foreseeable future - bags with puppets that can't be put in the washing machine or the candy-making kit for example. Some things I hope to use in programming at intervals allowing for them to be quarantined after use, like board games.

I'm gradually removing all hands-on stuff from the children's and teen area. It just kills me, because I spent 12 years making this a community space, a place to come and bring your kids or hang out with friends, and now we're going in the opposite direction. But, safety is safety and I'd rather lose all that than lose people in my library families, even the ones that drive me nuts!