How about a bit of feel-good news for a change?
From The Guardian comes a story about how the Melbourne, Australia, city library and its regional libraries reacted to being closed down by the Covid-19 pandemic back in March. The article is titled "When Covid closed the library: staff call every member of Victorian library to say hello." It could have just as easily been titled "Another reason we love our libraries and librarians so much."
When Melbourne’s Yarra Plenty regional libraries first went into lockdown in March, shut the doors and left the remaining unborrowed books on their shelves, staff were sent home with a phone.
“One of the hardest things about lockdown was people being separated from their community,” said Lisa Dempster, Yarra Plenty’s executive manager of public participation.
“The library is often a hub for the community, and we identified the most vulnerable cohort of our community would be the elderly.”
So the library staff pulled from their database the phone number of every library member over the age of 70 – a total of 8,000 records.
Then the librarians started calling those members. All of them.
Librarians and social workers made those 8,000 calls. Some of the calls lasted five minutes or less, and some of them went for as long as thirty minutes. The goal was giving the elderly library patrons back their sense of community and connectedness. And it worked. The library system also delivered as many books as possible before the pandemic lockdown tightened, and they did that in innovative ways.
Now, with Melbourne being in its fifth week of what they are calling "lockdown 2.0," the staff is calling all 8,000 of its elderly patrons again to see how they are coping with the stress of being shut-in for so long.
Click on the link up above for the rest of the story. It's a good one.
That's so cool! I love that they care so much for their patrons.
ReplyDeleteI was impressed...they really do seem to care.
DeleteThis is so nice to hear. I'm glad those library workers care more about their patrons than just circulating materials!
ReplyDeleteIt struck me as unusual at first, but I think that libraries have turned into real community centers these days, so maybe I shouldn't have been all that surprised.
DeleteAhh, good news for a change! I love it. How awesome is that library for caring so much about their patrons, especially the elderly ones? When my grandma was living alone in her 80s, she had a diligent librarian friend who brought her books every few weeks. Such an incredible service - not just to bring books but to chat and check in on vulnerable people. Just one more reason to love libraries and librarians!
ReplyDeleteI completely agree. I think the bond between readers and their local libraries and librarians is an unbreakable one. I've used the same library branch since 1972 and used it even when living in other countries on 30-day rotational hitches that allowed me to check out books for six weeks and still get them back on time.
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