When the world around us is chaotic and anxiety-inducing, sometimes it is hard to write about what is going on without sounding like one’s words are drowning in hyperbole. In times like these, we turn to coping strategies such as curling up with a good book or listening to music.
When you are looking for a good read, our staff hopes you’ll consider taking advantage of your shared resource — the public library. Many of you have been doing this; our curbside pickup numbers have been fairly steady, even during the fire-stricken
weeks. Our statistics also show dramatically higher numbers in e-book use since the shelter-in-place orders came in. I always like to highlight a few things that you might want to hear about and hope to answer a few questions as well this month.
Many of you have experienced a great deal of frustration over returning your materials to the library. While curbside pickup is a fairly clear-cut process, the process of taking the books back in is more challenging than one might think.
Even though we keep trying to get the word out that a few overdue library books is nothing to be concerned about in these challenging times, and remind everyone that we stopped charging for overdue materials over a year ago, it’s distressing to have a due date and see that pass by without being able to return your borrowed materials. I just want to express a great empathy for you about the situation; we know that could be very frustrating, especially if you’ve gone out of your way to try to return your books or DVDs and found our book drop to be closed when you arrived.
I have two answers for you that I hope will help ease the frustration. First, I hope you will understand the reason that we’ve had to curtail returns. The library has been following a number of federally-funded research projects on active COVID-19 virus particles and their persistence on library materials over several days’ time. Without going into great detail, the research takes time and new information is released every few weeks. That information has gone directly into our decision-making process about quarantine times and handling of those books, and the decisions we make are tied to safety for staff and community alike. It may come as a surprise that we quarantine the items for several days before even touching them at all, but that is part of what we are doing to drastically lower risk to anyone borrowing materials.
Second, we have been ordering additional carts that we can use to keep the books in during quarantine while taking in more books (usually we just empty out the book drop every day and use the same bin over and over) but those pesky supply chains have impacted our bins as well. However, we have at least managed to procure the necessary bins in order to make sure that we can accept materials on both Friday and Saturday as we’d originally promised, and we do hope to expand to other days very soon. Again, we really sympathize with you about your desire to return the items you’ve borrowed and will keep hard at work to try to make the process better.
On a cheerful note, we have also been working on rolling out new live virtual programming that may be of interest. The library system has been offering pre-recorded storytimes and other programming for several months, all of which is available on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/sonomalibrary. Lately, however, the staff at your local library has been leading the way in our county with experimentations in live programming for free using Zoom. In September and October, we would encourage you to explore the calendar of events listed on our website at events.sonomalibrary.org.
We have storytimes coming up with Miss Charity on Thursday mornings; a popular series of music classes, featuring music of Latin America for Hispanic Heritage Month, on guitar and ukulele with Fredy; a revitalized book club for adults with Allison; and a Women in Winemaking event put on by Megan from the Sonoma County Wine Library with support from the Friends of the Sonoma County Wine Library. Please take a look at the events calendar and see what is coming up, or give us a call at 707-433-3772 between the hours of 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. and we can give you the specifics on the phone. We can also help you figure out how to connect. We look forward to hearing from you.
Jon Haupt is the branch manager of the Healdsburg Regional Library.
