It’s a strange year to look back on but we have achieved the following.
We spent time linking our resources into PubMed to enable easier online access to our journal articles and to make the process of requesting articles easier as this can now be done from inside PubMed.
In February we introduced a book courier service following the successful introduction of this scheme at Bolton NHS Trust. This was going well until March when it had to be suspended.
We went fine-free. We noticed that fines were not encouraging people to return the books on time, in fact they were happy to pay a fine to keep the book for longer and we were spending increased amounts of staff time chasing overdues. It also kept our service in-line with many local public library services. We have not been able to assess the full impact of this– like many libraries we extended loan times considerably so have been unable to measure whether more books are returned or if staff time has been released.
We successfully bid for new blinds for the Library and I.T. suite which have much improved the look of the Library and finish off the room after building new study rooms and Library desk last year.
We added a collection of Focus games to our Collections to enhance the Trust training offer.
We increased our wellbeing offer. Library staff created Health and Wellbeing intranet pages for the Trust and trained staff how to update them. We continued to offer jigsaws, colouring and other mindful activities in the Library and we grew the membership of our reading group. We introduced tea and coffee-making facilities into the Library and held some knitting and crochet workshops. Many of these activities are on hold at the moment but we created an online Cluedo game for Libraries Week and staff who successfully completed the game were given a book we received for our previously cancelled World Book night giveaway.
We stayed open throughout the pandemic although staff worked in offices in the building rather than in the Library itself. We had to rearrange the library to ensure social distancing and reduce study space and PC availability. We have started to offer online training.
The pandemic pushed us to become more paper-free. Our membership forms and inter-library-loan and document supply forms were all administered and stored on paper in shared files. We created Word forms and an online filing system to streamline our processes and entirely using our shared Drives rather than a physical file.
Peta Jones
Outreach Librarian
