On Monday, March 16, 2020 at 2 p.m., the librarians and library staff were in a meeting discussing what precautions we needed to take to protect our students and ourselves with the spreading pandemic and what contingency plans we needed to make in case of closure. At approximately 2:30 p.m. we received new from the University's General Counsel that we needed to close by 3 p.m. in compliance with the Governor's Executive Order 2020-9. The news prompted us into swift action, alerting the students in the building that we needed to close by 3 p.m., as well as contacting other support units on campus, like ITS and OEL, and posting to our website and social media with the news.
Up until March 16 at 2:30, we were planning to remain open for the remainder of the Winter semester even with the decision to move all classes online. We knew that students rely on our space for computer and internet access, in addition to being a place away from the distractions of home life. This knowledge, and the fact that we have resources that support other aspects of student learning, guided our reopening plans throughout the summer.
Over the summer our librarians and staff were hard at work learning about the virus and developing plans to face the challenges of the new reality. Our Interim Director, Mickey Doyle, joined one of the reopening subcommittees to be informed about plans at a University level. Circulation staff and librarians began brainstorming ideas about how to reopen safely, detailing changes to current practices that would need to be made, making lists of extra cleaning supplies to order, and keeping abreast of what our library colleagues across the state and country were doing as well. We attended ALL the related webinars (...so many webinars) we could find.
Our reopening work ramped up in late July and August, but even before the end of April, some of our library staff and student workers had started to remove chairs to set up the library furniture for physical distancing. Finding places to store all the chairs took some ingenuity and pretty much all the semi-empty spaces and rooms we have.
The University's reopening committees approved most of our furniture removal and suggested a few other changes. They also set the occupancy levels for our study rooms. ITS took care of removing the majority of the computers and relocating a third floor printer to increase physical distance between students. We worked with DPS on how accessing the building would work with the locations of health check stations and what doors would be open. We also expanded our reservation system to include individual seats to help with contact tracing in case it is needed.
On the circulation side, we set up our counter to reduce contact as much as possible with assisted self-checkout, and we created a Curbside Pickup process for those students, faculty, and staff who did not want to come into the building. We also worked to make our physical collections accessible digitally, by buying available ebooks of the textbooks we had on course reserve and through HathiTrust's Emergency Temporary Access Services, which allows digital access to a majority of the books in our Main and Children's collections.
We are also following the best practices for returned items set out by the REALM Project from OCLC, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and Battelle, which is specifically testing how long the virus lives on common library surfaces in a variety of conditions. Additionally, Housekeeping has added extra cleaning and sanitizing procedures throughout the day and we are wiping down our common surfaces and providing sanitizing wipes to students.
While we were fairly prepared for our soft reopen on August 24, 2020, we've had to be nimble and make adjustments on the fly like designating two ITS computers as Quick Print Stations and adjusting how the Seats reservation system works. As the semester progresses we will continue to adjust to the needs of our students and the requirements set out by the University.
The semester is going well so far, with most students abiding by the new entry requirements of mask on, no food, and reserving seats or rooms. We also are seeing a very regular crowd, who are coming to campus because they need to. While the library is much quieter than usual, we know that we are here for those students who need us, whether physically or virtually.
If you want more details about the library reopening, please see our Reopening guide and check our FAQs or ask a librarian if you have additional questions.
University of Michigan-Flint
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