We are preparing for a fairly normal summer, programming-wise. This is a huge thing. We’ve been very shut down due to the pandemic and major construction in all our programming spaces, but, fingers crossed, construction will be mostly out of those spaces and summer will again be less dangerous, in Covid-19 terms, and we can run our summer reading program pretty normally.
My current challenges are: figuring out (as best we can) what will be safe to do in-person. Most of our program rooms are on the small side, and the biggest has gotten smaller thanks to construction, so we’re looking at small quick projects so we can get a lot of people through a program in small batches.
Talking myself and staff through the idea of transitioning from one indoor program a week to at least two a day, and also dealing with the fact that our schedules will change back to evenings and more weekends, but we don’t yet know what that will look like (which is very stressful and makes program planning very hard).
Remembering how much we can afford to knock ourselves out when we’re in-library full time. This is a big one for me. I am all too willing to work at 150% for a couple days, but I can’t do that if I have to be in the library and reasonably personable 5-6 days a week and 8 hours a day. Summer needs to be more like 105% but all the time, and then exhausted days off.
Helping new staff get up to scratch. About half of the children’s program people were here for our last normal summer, in 2019, but the other half weren’t.
Plus, there’s all the catching up, moving, and weeding for a return to normal. So yes, I’m pretty busy!
Story Time and other exciting things 