How are you doing?

Support from friends has helped me keep my chin up in the face of cabin fever and low-key panic, and I’ve been casting about for the same support at work. So I asked fellow ACRLoggers to share how things are going where they work:

What’s the situation at your institution, at the time of writing?

Maura Smale:
At my institution, the library and campus has been closed since mid-March, and with our Governor’s stay at home order currently scheduled through at least May 15th, and summer courses fully online, it’s not clear when we’ll go back to the physical library. Once closures were announced, my colleagues and I were able to get computers with remote desktop access distributed to all full-time library faculty and staff who need them to work remotely. I’m grateful that our library IT team was able to quickly set up laptops from our classroom with everything needed to enable folks to work from home, which has allowed us to continue to support the college community and move forward on many of the projects we had in progress before the pandemic.

Jennifer Jarson:
Currently, classes at all Penn State campuses are fully online and all library locations are physically closed and library faculty/staff have been working remotely since then. Much of our ongoing work has continued but with some adjustments. Like everyone, we’ve cancelled or postponed a number of programs and events, moved others online, and are working on new ideas about how to connect with our students and faculty in this new reality. University administration announced that all pre-tenure faculty will automatically have an extra year on the tenure clock (but can choose to stay on their original timeline if they wish). All librarians have faculty status at my institution and many are on the tenure track, so folks are evaluating the impact of the pandemic on their work and weighing their options.  

Emily Hampton Haynes (That’s me):
My community college campus has also been closed since mid-March, and my director worked hard to ensure that everyone on the library team would be able to work from home. We’ve been working out the kinks of Microsoft Teams meetings and entertaining different scenarios for how the summer and fall might look, based mostly on speculation and hope. I’ve seen a lot of photos of my coworkers’ pets!

What is your day-to-day look like on the job right now?

Jen:
I’m trying to stick to regular work hours right now in an effort to maintain some boundaries and to keep work from taking over the whole day every day. I’m not caring for small children and thankfully no one in my household is ill right now, so I have the luxury of being able to set and manage only my own routine. My daily agenda, though, varies widely just as it always has. I’m the head of a small branch library in an enormous library system, so my job is part administrative, part teaching and learning/public services, and part whatever else needs doing. Of course, all this work is taking place from home. As part of a large organization distributed across the state, Zoom meetings and virtual work were already a regular part of my daily life so the transition to 100% remote work hasn’t felt as jarring for me as it likely has for others.   

Emily:
Like most academic libraries, we were about to launch into the busiest weeks of info lit instruction for the semester. Instead of spending the last month in the classroom, busy but vibrant, I’ve found myself with more unstructured time than I was expecting. Rather than live instruction, most faculty who had library visits scheduled chose to have us create tip sheets (which we make using LibGuides) and database demo videos. I hope these asynchronous teaching materials will be helpful to students, but I miss sharing the same space. I didn’t realize how much physical presence mattered to my teaching. As we consider a hybrid online/f2f fall semester, I want to find more ways to be personable, maybe with video-chat reference appointments or standing office hours.

How have you kept communication going with students, faculty, or other users? 

Maura:
Another major difference since the move to remote work has been the increase in communication between all of the library directors at my university. Our directors’ council typically meets monthly during the academic year, but in the rush to close the physical campuses we convened an ad hoc Zoom meeting on the Friday of that first week of closures. We’ve ended up keeping that time each week since for us to get together less formally, and it’s been useful to share information about common questions and concerns about our budgets, book orders, remote work for our part-time staff, and the status of the consortial library systems platform migration we’re in the midst of (!), among other topics. With COVID-19 so prevalent in New York City we’re all hearing about cases in our campus communities, too, and I’ve been grateful for the support we’re offering each other in this group.

Jen:
Maintaining, or even growing, our relationships with our students, faculty, and staff feels just as important as ever, if not more so. We’ve done some general messaging to students via emails through our Student Affairs office and FAQs on our campus website, but connecting with students feels even more challenging as we don’t have much unmediated access to them right now. Faculty are our most direct route so we’ve tried to highlight to them the role they can play in helping students connect with us, particularly for research and reference consultations. We drafted a general message for students about how to get help and sent that out to faculty, hoping they might copy/paste it into an announcement in their courses on our LMS. We’re working on ways to shift some already scheduled student-centered programming/events online and also to create new online opportunities in collaboration with our Student Affairs colleagues. On a more general level, our campus advising department invited faculty/staff to help conduct wellness check phone calls to students in order to assess how they’re coping, connect them with campus resources and services, and generally offer support. Our library team is participating in this effort, as well.

What has surprised you most about library work during this crisis?

Maura:
One thing that’s surprised me is the amount of (digital) paperwork required for us to all work remotely. The college required all workers — full-time and part-time — to complete a flexible work scheduling form that documents the work to be done while telecommuting, plus additional documentation to complete for those who took library laptops home with them. With 24 full-time and 27 part-time faculty and staff it took a few weeks for us to get the paperwork sorted. At work we all have the same basic computer setup, but at home we do not, and it’s been far more complicated than I expected to address the issues many of us have encountered in digitally signing PDFs requiring signatures from library workers as well as me (as library director).

Emily:
I am reckoning with the diminished mental capacity I’ve had since I’ve started work from home. I’ve seen a few Twitter threads (like this one) that have been validating; underneath whatever we’re trying to make our brains do right now, we are going through collective trauma and processing a constant but invisible threat. I have research plans for this summer that I’m excited about, but I’m struggling to use this “newfound time” on them. This very post took me 2 weeks to write! I’m accustomed to being able to turn a product around quickly, be it teaching materials, a blog post, or an email, and am trying not to be disappointed in myself that tasks are taking me much longer than usual. Veronica’s post from a few weeks ago has been very encouraging to me. Her final sentence bears repeating: Our output may be messier, but it’s “the best work we can do during a global pandemic and that work is worth celebrating.” 

I hope you are all able to stay safe and healthy. Share your frustrations or triumphs with us in the comments, this is a space where we can lean on each other.