May COVID-19 Work Chronicles

     Work life DC (during corona) is weird but has slowly become a habit. I got into work on Monday and Friday while teleworking from home Tuesday-Thursday. On the days I work from home, I answer chat reference questions, monitor our seven Facebook pages, do professional development by watching webinars and answer my work emails New changes that have occurred DC include having tons of teleconference meetings by my boss to boost staff morale and plan for the future. I mentioned in a previous posts that we're planning to have our summer reading program online.

     For the online summer reading program, since this is the first time we're doing this, staff will have to be trained on how to used the new online platform. In addition, since a secondary component of the summer reading program is entertainment, we are having to work with the performers we already hired to see if they can come to the library and have their performance recorded. Luckily, most of the performers have been willing to work with the library to make the performances happen. The biggest issue with this from the performer perspective is how long is the library going to have their video available of our social media channels since they want to keep the element of surprise when it comes to their performance. I suggested having the video available online from the time it is recorded until the end of the reading program which will be in early August but we shall see how this goes.

     Other future projects my boss wants staff to do is create content for a library newsletter, create content for our new YouTube channel, investigate establishing a book delivery service, establish ways to perform outreach during this crisis. So far, library staff have sent handwritten cards to patrons that regularly visit the library which has been well received. At our last staff telemeeting, she suggested that she may have staff call patrons to check on them. I feel really uncomfortable about doing this considering my impression is that when a person signs up for a library card, they trust that the will not be called by the library unless it is for library business. Library staff aren't social workers and as such, staff should not be put into a position where that may be told things that they can't do anything about or hear distressing information. I am proud of myself for communicating my concerns to my boss via email. 

     As time DC passes, I am feeling more and more burnt out of the public library environment because I feel like my director is oblivious to the low staff morale. Since my director is part of several Facebook groups for library directors and follows several library Facebook pages, as she's seeing what bigger libraries are doing and wants us to be doing all the things in an effort to so have "essential" the library is and instead of all the staff picking in so the whole library can succeed, this ends up falling on the shoulders of one of two people.