for Heads of Service and library staff to connect with peers, share ideas and information, ask questions and problem solve together. These online sessions have explored staff welfare, preparing buildings, delivering Home Library and School Library Services, Order & Collect and restarting browsing and IT services. A key feature of the webinars is hearing from people with first-hand experience of delivering library services during Covid. What has been useful is not just hearing about their planning process but finding out what is actually happening in practice. Libraries are very much in the people business, and people’s reactions are to some extent unpredictable. So listening to how staff, volunteers, library workers and the public have reacted has been invaluable. This has included useful advice drawn from experience – such as the need to really look after staff involved in meet-and-greet, because the work to manage queues and explain the new procedures can be gruelling. In the latest webinar we also heard from three library services that had al- ready opened on a limited basis and they had incredibly helpful insights on the initial demand for their services as well as the dangers that hand sanitisers pre- sented to floor surfaces! They also talked about how emotional it was reopening their doors and especially seeing some of their regular customers who were clearly over the moon to be able to return. Beyond the practicalities of reopening buildings and reintroducing services, the toolkit also looks further ahead and
June-July 2020
explores how events and activities could be gradually restored, and how to sustain the expanded digital offer that libraries have worked so hard to develop and that has been met with such enthusiasm.
Priorities for recovery
It also acknowledges one of the issues that library leaders are most concerned about which is that the increased financial pressure facing their local authorities may lead to some library buildings not reopening at all. So the last part of the toolkit begins to think about the priorities for local advocacy that would demonstrate the key role of libraries in helping communities to recover. We agreed on five advocacy priorities, that link to our new universal offers as follows:
l Economic recovery: Information and Digital Offer – Job seeker support, business skills, training, volunteering, apprenticeships etc.
l Education support: Reading/Digi- tal and Information Offer – for students who struggled to learn at home and SEND students
l Digital inclusion: Information and Digital Offer – Supporting residents with little or no IT skills and/or no access to the Internet
l Isolation mitigation: Health and Well- being Offer – Combating the harmful effects for vulnerable groups and tackling loneliness
l Cultural ecology: Culture and Creativ- ity Offer – Helping local artists and cultural organisations to reach an audience.
We are looking at this advocacy work in
two stages. To begin, we are pulling together a quick set of resources that libraries can use locally now in each of these five areas. The second stage will look at a national advocacy campaign, with partners that include CILIP and the Arts Council. This will focus on one of these issues for a whole year which will look at gathering new impact data and creating a coordi- nated marketing campaign to promote the importance of libraries to new users, partners and decision-makers. While we focus on addressing the impact of Covid on libraries and communities we are also mindful of the need to retain and develop our ambition and vision for libraries. So, we are working with Libraries Unlimited and the Wellcome Centre to present a series of five talks from lead- ing international thinkers in library and community practice. Open to library staff around the country, we are exploring these library pioneers’ insights into creating meaningful roadmaps for our ‘new normal’ and discussing current challenges and potential futures for library spaces. There is so much for libraries to do in the months and years ahead to help rebuild their local communities, support the bereaved, reconnect the isolated and restore local economies. The gradual reopening of doors over the next few weeks is the critical first step in being able to play that vital role and we are delighted to sup- port libraries through this process. IP
l
www.librariesconnected.org.uk/resource/library- recovery-toolkit-june-2020-pdf
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