This time last year the library team started working from home, our library spaces remained open for self-service loans, PC and study space however the rest of our services started being delivered remotely.  We started with only enough laptops for 4 members of the team but eventually managed to obtain laptops for the whole team.  We restarted our physical library service at end of July 2020 with some staff at work and some at home on a rota basis and we have continued with this model of working.  We have developed online training via teams, inductions videos, increased our eJournal and eBook provision. 

COVID-19 – we supported trust senior leaders with a daily COVID-19 bulletin with new and updated guidelines from external organisations.   We also created an intranet page to support this work providing easy access to all guidelines in one place.  We were also asked to support the organisation stay up-to-date with the latest research evidence. We developed a weekly evidence alert pulling together high quality research evidence and a COVID evidence web page with links to key sources of research evidence. A COVID patient information bulletin was created with high quality sources of information for patients which was promoted during Health Information Week.   Sarah Gardner, Clinical Librarian is also a reviewer on the COVID-19 search bank.

Library improvement work - Our library at DRI was closed for 8 weeks in May as it needed some essential fire improvement work, the work included some new entrance doors to the library with vision panels which has means staff can see inside the library which is a big improvement to the space.

Native Interfaces Early Adopters Project – we joined the pilot as part of the East Midlands group.  We received training from the different providers, carried out literature searches using the native interfaces and participated in before and after action reviews.

Katherine France
Health Libraries Strategic Manager