Saint John Public Library (Image: Elizabeth MacLeod)
The New Brunswick Public Library Service is rolling out its steps to safely reopen its 64 libraries across the province.
“We’re working hard to get ready, but it won’t be an opening where everyone opens at the same time,” said Ella Nason, Director of Operations. “Each individual library is working on an operational plan, following the instructions that had been issued both by the Government of New Brunswick and by WorkSafe NB to make sure that we’ve done everything that we need to do to prepare.”
Libraries will reopen in the upcoming weeks, by individual roll out. Each location will follow the provincial government and WorkSafe NB’s instructions, as well the standard guidelines document that published on May 8th when “orange” phase of reopening was announced.
Those who have standards and logistics set up to protect their staff and patrons being the first to open.
“We’d like to be able to open the ones that have everything in place, to have them be able to open rather than to try to harmonize in 64 different places,” she said.
Nason added the library services is focused on getting books in people’s hands once again, sharing they have had many people reach out to tell them they would like to be able to return the books they checked out before the pandemic.
“We’re asking people to return their books to our book-drops then what we’ll do is we’ll set them aside for 72 hours,” she said. “That is based on research that we’ve done on what libraries are doing internationally and we also did run that by the experts who were managing responses here at GNB to ensure that they were happy with the research and recommendation that we had prepared.”
Items will remain on an individual’s account for the 72-hour period, but Nason assured they are registered as checked in on the date they were returned.
Since the library closures in mid-March there has been an enormous uptick in Electronic Library New Brunswick’s services, including OverDrive, pretnumerique and CELA. Issuing library cards was up 122%, audio book circulation is up 77% and e-book circulation for the week of May 11th-17th was up 92% from the previous three-year average.
“We’ve seen rises as high as 200% compared to typical weeks,” shared Nason.
Examples of the most popular books borrowed electronically are popular and romance fiction, and in particular “How To” books.
“We’ve done some things to feature things related to the time of the year, we’ve done some things around learning to garden and things that are useful based on what’s happening in the world,” she said.
At first people will only be able to visit their library to pick up an item and check it out, but services will expand to include programming, reference services and computer services once it is safe to do so.
Nason anticipates there will be a lot of traffic to the library book drops and people wanting to borrow new titles.
“We’re planning to have a greeter at the door to help us to manage with how traffic may come,” she explained. That way we will be able to have a plan in place to manage that and we know how many people are able to be in the library at a time and we have a means to manage line ups.”
“Many of library users are very fond of the library and can’t wait to get back and the staff feel the same way, they can’t wait to see their regulars again,” said Nason.
