Well, that was a long break! Sorry everyone, life got away, especially work, but now we have COVID-19, and I am enjoying everyone else’s blogs, so I thought I should get back at it myself.
What am I doing? Well, I am working from home (we had four weeks administrative leave and then they brought the librarians and managers back and are slowly adding additional staff as we figure out how to get everyone we can working from home). I do virtual programs on FB live four days a week, and spend the rest of the time planning those and ordering ebooks and figuring out how summer reading is going to work! Such is the life of a children’s librarian at home.
I enjoy FB live programming more than I thought I would, I’m getting enough interactions during the course of each program to feel like I’m really doing a real service, especially for my live storytimes, which I do twice a week. I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned, some of which are at odds with what I’ve seen elsewhere, and some of which are things I’ve never seen expressed at all!
Virtual Storytime: do it, if at all possible. They are consistently the most popular regular online thing we do, as they are the most popular regular in-person thing we do.
Copyright issues: We are using only books by three authors who have made it clear online that they are happy to have things shared widely while COVID is on. We are sharing these widely, and have not had any pushback, so I think it’s okay. The authors are Sandra Boynton, Mo Willems and Ryan T. Higgins. I have invested heavily in copies of my own by these three authors, thereby supporting both them and a Toronto bookstore that is doing delivery (Book City) so I feel good about that. My wife and I are both incredibly lucky to be still being paid as normal, so we are able to do things like this. Otherwise I’ve been singing my normal songs and doing my normal rhymes, and if I’m breaking any copyrights I assume someone will let me know and I will take them down–but most of the storytime songs and rhymes I use are not anything that is copyrighted anywhere. I may progress to singing some songs by performers (like Laurie Berkner) that I like and who have given permission, but I will never use recorded music, as FB mostly takes it down, and anyway, I don’t ever use it for ordinary storytime in the library either.
Presentation: I film in front of my living room bookcase every week, and I change up the toys and knick knacks that you can see behind me every week. It’s a bit busy, but everyone seems to like it, and I ask every few weeks if anyone finds it difficult to see and would like me to move to a cleaner background. I am a dressing-up kind of children’s librarian anyway, so I try to wear my fun dresses and headbands and earrings the same as I often do in-person. I highly recommend Etsy and the wonderful Svaha if you want fun apparel of your own! Most of my headbands come from Clare’s or from Target $1 bins when I was in the States, and my earrings come from all over.
Technology: I use my own iPhone with the Facebook app. I find the limited screen is made up for by the fact that it has a much better camera than either the laptop or the iPad my Library has provided. And in a way, a limited screen is fine, it means I can prepare less background! The screen flip is easy to use with the iPhone app now they’ve fixed the green issue, and my sound and picture are both pretty good with my iPhone X.
Online Book Club: I’ve been reading aloud chapters of an out-of-print children’s chapter book every week, and while it gets little engagement while I’m filming, and I’ve never yet gotten any answers to my discussion questions, it does actually get pretty good stats, about 80 people watch at least part of it every week, and I’ve received emails saying families are using the questions at home. I may not repeat it once this book is over, but it’s worth finishing. This I film on a quieter background while wearing something interesting but more grown up, since it’s more for kids 8 years and up.
Science experiments online: a big part of my job since I last blogged has become being my library’s “Mad Scientist-in-Chief”. I run a Mad Scientist’s Club twice a week after school and the same content for homeschoolers and unschoolers once a week. So of course I do science online now! Once a week I either film and upload or FB Live a simple experiment with stuff most people have at home. I spend a lot of time researching this one, as it’s quite hard to find things with really simple ingredients that can be shown in less than 5 minutes. For this I wear my lab coat and I try to have science-y earrings on. Sometimes I film this on the iPad rather than my phone, as a bigger screen is easier with science. But I do notice the down in image quality. These videos are always less pretty than my other ones, as I do have to sometimes be in my kitchen if it’s messy, or move the device around to show results. They do pretty well as well, but storytimes definitely get the most traffic on FB.
Summer Reading: We’ve signed up for Beanstack, we are working on ideas for small in-library programs and large online camps and daily programs, we’ll just have to see how reopening goes in Ontario! Right now we are doing curbside pickup (not me, but some of our Circulation staff) and it’s going well–started last week.
So that’s my job with COVID-19!
If you are a librarian struggling with online programming and want more info, please let me know and I will try to help!
If you’d like some what I’m knitting or cooking, or what the cats are doing posts, let me know that too, and I can add some of that!
Stay safe and well everyone!
Story Time and other exciting things 