Dorothy Claussen said she knew her library lessons at Woodrow Wilson Elementary had to shift to a digital emphasis during the pandemic for the students’ sake.
“They had to shift because teaching them library skills they weren’t coming in to use didn’t seem like the best use of time,” Claussen said.
It’s a national issue faced by schools holding in-person classes during the pandemic.
Claussen said the first of her new lessons involved the use of technology to put books on hold and view the catalogue of titles available in the school library. Students can reserve books from their iPads and have them delivered to their class, or they have the option of checking out books directly from either Claussen or library clerk Brigitte Bruegger with a laptop and book cart.
“They are going class to class and loading up the cart with a range of titles,” said Danny Simon, principal at Woodrow Wilson Elementary. “They’re also teaching their library lessons and doing checkout in classrooms (with a scanner and a laptop).”
Simon said the library staff at his school “have a pretty cool operation set up” to deliver books to children. He said this pandemic-inspired change in library services is quite different from what he remembers his school experience being.
“Kids are well-versed in finding new titles online, checking them out virtually, and having them brought to class,” Simon said. “This has opened up a lot of possibilities for the future.”
Simon said school employees recently rearranged the library and brought in a new circulation desk. During a USD 383 school board meeting April 21, Lucas Loughmiller, district director of library and instructional media services, told board members that the library in Woodrow Wilson Elementary feels bigger after the changes. He said many of the district’s school libraries focus on collaborative learning spaces for students, and employees cannot use them in their intended manner because of the pandemic. This led to librarians “putting a lot of miles” on book carts, and a shift in the focus of the library into a space for self-care.
“A lot of times kids would have class in the library, and I’d see them looking at book after book; there’s a certain level of excitement sometimes in the library,” Simon said. “That is missing this year, but it’s really forced us into doing some things I think will carry on into the future, like online checkout.”
Simon said he hopes some of the new systems librarians in the district have put into place also will apply to summer programs, to give children an opportunity to check out books online and pick them up along with summer lunch from their school.
“I think some of these changes are really going to play into getting more books into kids’ hands over the course of the entire year,” Simon said.
Claussen said to mitigate risk of spreading COVID-19, the library sanitizes all books and places them in their own designated tub for quarantine for three days or more before being recirculated. If a book is in quarantine and a student wishes to check it out, they must wait until the quarantine process is complete to pick it up. However, they can reserve the book online while they wait. Claussen said the National Library Association recommended a three-day wait period before returning books to shelves, and there are no recorded cases of virus outbreaks being caused by library books.
“It’s some piece of normalcy that we can offer, and we’ve learned with students using iPads on a 1-to-1 ratio that we need to give them a break from that,” Claussen said. “A library book is a good thing to go back to, instead of solely reading on a device.”
Loughmiller said students are reading just as many physical books as they read electronic copies. “Kids still like a tactile read,” Loughmiller said.
Claussen said making that tactile read safer is something she and her staff are diligent about.
“You see a book and think, ‘Oh, that book looks okay,’ then you take a Lysol wipe to it and cringe at the results,” Claussen said.
Claussen said librarians in the district exercise caution when sending books back and forth between schools through the interlibrary loan system because of the potential for spreading the coronavirus. However, with repeated practice of book sanitizing and the new circulation desk, she said she is excited by the hope that library services will be “back to business as usual” at the start of next school year.
“I could certainly empathize with students here who were frustrated trying to find what they wanted to read early on,” Claussen said. “But we made do.”
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