Last month, Homerton College Library at the University of Cambridge reopened their doors after six months of being closed due to the pandemic. The library reopened with new measures in place to ensure the health and safety of the students, staff and librarians.

Here Liz Osman, Librarian at Homerton College Library, shares her experience of the library after lockdown, the strategies in place and what the future holds for her role and the College Library.

After months of remote learning, you’ve reopened Homerton Library. How has this worked so far?

It’s going well. We’ve had to make quite a few changes, but overall I think we’ve managed to keep the Library as close as possible to normal. We’re really looking forward to having students back on site now and the Library coming to life with them.

What strategies are you implementing at Homerton library to ensure the safety of your staff and students?

Staff have moved onto a team system working some days on site and some at home, so we’re operating in two little bubbles to minimise the chance of infection but maintain service. There’s perspex around the enquiry desk and a one way system on the stairs.

There’s hand sanitiser and wipes throughout the Library, and a smaller number of computers and seats so that students can maintain social distancing. We’re asking everyone to wear a mask in the Library and to book a seat as we’re anticipating more demand than usual now students are not travelling into the town centre for lectures during the day.

We’re quarantining returned books for 24 hours to minimise any chance of infection from handling them. We’re also launching a live chat service as another way to assist students with enquiries.

Has the pandemic changed the way you now operate? If so, do you think this has been a positive change?

The pandemic has definitely forced us to consider our ways of working and what we can deliver remotely. We’ve had to communicate in a much more organised manner and become comfortable with video meetings. Not having to travel to meetings is a much better use of my time.

I think we all miss being together as a team and all the small, seemingly insignificant interactions involved in that. However, now we are working both on site and remotely I’m finding I can be really productive. Our focus now is really to provide a library service that doesn’t highlight the differences; to provide something to our students that is familiar, reliable and helpful.

How has your role changed this year?

In many ways it hasn’t, in that I’ve continued to try to lead and manage my team and library services, but the practicalities of this have been completely new! I’ve had to focus on communication a lot more and that has been a challenge at times.

I’ve also had to plan and re-plan goodness knows how many times, and deal with my frustrations about uncertainties whilst still keeping my team in good spirits. Now I can look back on it to some extent it has been an incredible development opportunity, but not one I would have chosen to take!

What has been the biggest challenge from the past 6 months for your library?

For me, the biggest challenge was closing the Library in March at short notice. Alongside the practicalities of closing the building, trying to plan how to offer a service from home to start from the following Monday was hard even to conceptualize.

I also needed to keep my team informed of what was happening and try to speak with them to understand and arrange their working from home. All in the space of about two days.

We also created a small general interest collection (The Little Library) that was moved into a room in College where it could be accessed by those students who had to live onsite through lockdown.

There have been many challenges since, but I think the shock of actually needing to close the library and do it so quickly was the hardest as it was difficult to accept. It goes against my professional nature!

Moving forward, do you anticipate your role and the library to continue to evolve? If so, how?

I think we’re always evolving to some degree, with or without a pandemic to spur us on. We’ve seen a much greater reliance on ebooks during lockdown but it’s unclear whether that will continue now students can access physical resources again.

I don’t believe Covid will be the end of physical libraries. I certainly think there’s some evaluating to be done around working practices and work life balance slightly further down the line, but it’s a tricky balance when you need to be providing an excellent on-site service.

For the immediate future, we are all settling into our new working patterns and doing the normal preparations for Michaelmas term. The time for reflection and more permanent changes will be into 2021.

If you would like to tell us about your library after lockdown please get in touch, or tag us @CambridgeUPLibrary with #librariesafterlockdown

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