CUATL Ep. 15: Reimagining community during COVID-19

Claire Woodcock: “Hey Mark, how are you doing? Acknowledging that that’s kind of a loaded question these days.”

Mark Locy: “Hi Claire! To answer your question, I’ve actually been reflecting a lot on this past year. And I’d like to share my thoughts with you.”

CW: “The elephant in the Zoom?”

ML “The whole COVID thing, yeah. The libraries had to make a lot of changes and a lot of hard decisions, and we had to make them very quickly. And, not all of them were popular.

CW: “Right! I think it’s fair to say that the way we think of library communities have been completely disrupted this year.

ML: “On this episode of CU at the Libraries, we’re reflecting on our response to the pandemic and how we’ve been reimagining the community that makes up an academic library in 2020.”

CW: “We’re looking at the remote and in-person services and resources, and how this will shape the ways in which we support the community’s research endeavors for years to come.”

ML: “We’ve spoken to a lot of librarians and stewards of our collections for this episode…”

CW: “And they’ve been amazing, humoring us by setting up home recording studios.

ML: “Laughs” “Shoutout to everyone who put a blanket over their head to phase out weird room noises…”

CW: “Thanks for tuning in, we hope you’ll stay with us!”

ML: “In the three days before CU Boulder went fully remote, the libraries’ experienced this collective adrenaline rush… and not the kind you get from the a-ha! moment when you’re reading a really good book."

Brittany Reed: “It felt like it wasn’t that much different than when there’s like a big snowstorm or blizzard that you’re sort of preparing for…

ML: “This is Brittany Reed, by the way. She’s the Service Operations Manager for Norlin Library. There’s this odd excitement, even though it’s like a potentially scary thing that’s coming.”

Carl Stewart, the library's building manager, told us the situation was constantly changing.”

CS: “I remember one of the things I felt really good about was the sanitation, you know it seemed like sanitation was the key thing when students were coming into the library, and so it was, how can we give people confidence that you know they’re walking into a clean place and that they can study without feeling like they’re getting contaminated.”

ML: “So Carl quickly came up with a plan--custodians would disinfect the libraries’ tables and mark it with a piece of blue tape. Students would remove the blue tape when they were done, letting custodial staff know that the table needed to be disinfected again.”

CS: “It seemed like a great system and we developed the system in about a day and got the posters made… then the next thing we know…

ML: “Norlin closes. But we were holding out hope for the branch libraries. In theory, a smaller space would have been manageable. Brittany explains--”

BR: “The initial response for branches was focused on, how do we stay open with no student employees and limited professional employee staffing.”

ML: “This went on Wednesday and Thursday...”

BR: “And then suddenly by Friday, it became very clear that we were going to close the branches too and it was stressful… It was just a lot of complicated shifting of people and trying to meet everybody’s essential needs.”

ML: “Which is challenging because when you think of an academic library, you first and foremost think of a place where you can study.”

CS: “The library is just not like any of the other buildings on campus, people are expecting us to always be open. That’s one of the things that we, you know, open access is one of our hallmarks.”

ML: “Open access to not only spaces but to the libraries’ collections… and instructors that work with these collections on a regular basis. But what happens when you can’t access the collections you’re using for your academic scholarship? Japanese and Korean Studies Librarian Adam Lisbon’s take on the situation is not for the faint of heart.

Adam Lisbon: “When I started to realize that the pandemic meant the building would be shutting down and we wouldn’t have access to our physical collections… I realized it would be like getting cut off from the scholarship of Japan and Korea.”

ML: “Japan and Korea have different copyright laws and different practices around scholarship, which means there’s still a lot of print materials that Adam needs access to.”

AL: “And I realized that new scholarship and new research wouldn’t be coming from overseas, and so it felt like the world was about to shrink dramatically. So for me personally, losing access was sort of a gut punch, not just about doing research or my job, but to a part of who I am.”

ML: “A lot of us were feeling like Adam, not to mention our students, which left us wondering how we could reimagine the libraries as an online-only community.”

CW: “So we’re at the point where the libraries are online-only, and the question on everyone’s mind was, how am I going to check out books I need to finish out the semester.”

“Gabrielle Wiersma has the answer. She leads the Collection Management Team, and says their first order of business at the time was to make sure print materials from our collections were available to students and researchers in e-book form.”

Gabrielle Wiersma: “E-books are a really good long term investment for libraries, because unlike a print book which can be lost, stolen or damaged, an ebook doesn’t take up any shelf space, and it can’t be lost or stolen. Another really nice thing about e-books is that they are available 24/7. Therefore, they can be borrowed and returned any time and they’re accessible wherever people are.”

CW: “This brings us to a really cool initiative called the HathiTrust. There are 140 plus academic research libraries, including the University Libraries. Its mission is to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future.

“For context, in the last 12 years, members have contributed more than 16 million volumes to the digital library. More than 6 million of these contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available online. But what’s especially cool about this is...”

GW: “As a member, we have access to digital copies of almost half of the print books in our collection.”

CW: “This is thanks in part to HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service. This program allows member libraries who have suffered an unexpected or temporary disruption to normal operations to provide patrons with access to specific digital materials that correspond to physical books held by their own library.”

GW: “As part of the agreement, we need to limit circulation to the books that we have digital access to in our print collection. As soon as the libraries are able to resume normal operations and reopen, we would lose access to those ebooks.”

CW: “This means that until we’re confident that we can open the stacks without risk to our community, in order for us to keep participating in the program, we have to keep the stacks closed. But there’s a certain loss associated with that.”

GW: “We know that roaming around the library and getting lost in the stacks are really quintessential college experiences. You tend to find books that pique your interest when you just browse the shelves and potentially stumble across something that you didn’t expect to find.”

CW: “You may have even gotten lost on the second floor next to the Ask a Librarian desk Cynthia Keller would be there to help. She coordinates librarian instruction experiences for first-year students. She says after the university went online-only, she and her colleagues became remote learning specialists.”

Cynthia Keller: “We have a lot of knowledgeable and energetic teaching librarians who like to design these types of learning experiences for students, but we’re used to doing that in an in-person format. So then what does that look like online? Maybe that’s using something like breakout rooms in Zoom. Maybe it’s using other technologies that allow for multi-person brainstorming and then how do we communicate with students in a virtual setting and still try to create that sense of community?”

CW: “Cynthia says they encouraged each other to be open about the challenges inherent in making this switch. Because none of us became experts overnight.”

CK: “We tried to make sure those practices are also driven by our values. So creating learning spaces that are safe, inclusive, welcoming, inviting, challenging…”

CW: “Cynthia thinks educators can feel pressured to present perfect lessons and learning experiences for their students at all times.”

CK: “I remember in the first few Zoom classes I taught, I messed up on the technology. I couldn’t figure out, oh, how to share video properly with the sound playing. Instead of letting that throw me, instead of fumbling at that point, I told students that yes, I’m learning this too.”

CW: “She hopes modeling authenticity will help students feel more comfortable taking risks and make learning from mistakes part of the student experience.

“The student experience was also at the center of Documenting Community, 2020, a new digital archival project focused on responses to COVID-19 and how it’s impacted lives.

“Susan Guinn-Chipmann, project co-coordinator and exhibit manager says the libraries’ collections of distinctions team created this project to preserve the student experience for future researchers to learn from.”

Susan Ginn-Chipmann: “The project grew from a conversation that I had with several of our students the day before campus closed in March. They were lamenting the end of their senior year coming rather abruptly and they were seeing themselves and their friends scattered to the wind. The project seemed like a good approach for helping them process and express what they were going through in real-time.”

CW: “As a historian, Susan says she’s often struck by the lack of voices from the everyday person living through past public health crises.”

SG: “There’s just not much in the way of letters. There’s not much in the way of diaries, at least not as much as I would like.”

CW: “For instance, when she was looking through CU Boulder special collection materials relating to the 1918 pandemic, she found limited representations of the student experience.

"But she did uncover a diary from a student at that time.”

SG: “Mary Helen Carpenter was a freshman from Pueblo and her diary discusses the fact that she was very distraught about having to leave school early. Her diary is a very poignant reminder of what students can go through on a very individual basis.”

CW: ‘’Therefore, Susan sees collecting and preserving student responses to COVID-19 as an urgent historical imperative. This project illustrates what’s essentially a movement that’s proactively preserving the present for the future to learn from.”

ML: “This fall, two of our branches--Gemmill and the Business Library--opened intermittently to provide study spaces for students. We also expanded remote support staff this semester for the libraries’ Ask a Librarian service.

“Ask A Librarian is essentially our reference desk, and right now, we’ve doubled down on the instant messaging services. Brittany says the service is staffed every hour we’re open or have service hours available. But, sometimes students prefer other forms of communication.”

BR: “For the fall semester, we were piloting Zoom drop-in consultations so that if a patron comes in and they really just want to talk to somebody, whether it is through video like Zoom or using just phone, you can have a real conversation with a real human because IM is great, but it has its limitations. And it isn’t, you know, like connecting to a human.”

ML: “Projects like Documenting Community, 2020 have also continued and the libraries have continued to host some events, including a panel discussion on the centennial of the 19th Amendment, the CU Living Library program and Pawffice Hours, where students could drop-in to a Zoom room and meet the pets keeping us company. We continued to acquire important cultural and historical materials for our archives, like the Los Seis de Boulder sculpture, as well as new furniture for our study spaces, based on feedback we received from students. 

"We were especially stoked to begin filling the void in offering access to print materials through our contactless pickup services in the fall semester. Brice Austin manages collection caretaking for the libraries. He explains how the libraries have worked with evolving safety recommendations from the CDC to process requests and returns with community safety in mind.”

Brice Austin: “Currently what we’re doing is books that come down the book drop, their returns are spread out onto tables so that they aren’t stacked up. The virus tends to live longer on stacked books so if you spread them out, you can quarantine them for less time.”

ML: “At the time of recording, the recommended amount of quarantine time for books was four days.”

BA: “As far as books going out, if they’ve been sitting in the stacks for months and haven’t been pulled, they’ve sort of been in their own quarantine. So we don’t worry about that too much, but we do wear gloves. We do bag up the books so that other people can’t handle them when they’re outside or look through them.”

ML: “This semester, community members have picked up thousands of books this way. But for some students, getting books has been a challenge. Anna Kramer is a PhD student in the History Department. She relies on Interlibrary Loan to acquire materials. But due to safety concerns, the libraries’ have had to suspend the mailing, lending and borrowing of physical items from other libraries. This is, in part, based on the capacities of other libraries to support those services."

Anna Kramer: “Not being able to get full books or certain primary sources via InterLibrary Loan has proved to be a growing challenge for myself and other grad students. We either have to buy them or get piecemeal copies of digitized chapters, or find some other way of getting our hands on them, which adds another complication of getting our own research done.”

ML: "Although the libraries are digitizing book chapters upon request, it’s not a quick process. For time’s sake, Anna says that while she’s been able to purchase books she’s needed for her research, not every student has the resources to do this."

AK: "So over the course of the fall semester I’ve gotten increasingly sort of frustrated with the inability to have what is for graduate students in the humanities, a pretty essential research resource. The library is essential and a really awesome space. I mean, it’s our lab in many senses."

ML: "Anna hopes that next semester, Interlibrary Loan services can be up and running in a way that is safe for everyone. Robert H. McDonald is Dean of Libraries and the Senior Vice Provost of Online Education. He says the libraries will continue to remain agile as we support an information-empowered world. That means we will continue to listen to the needs of our community as we make changes to our services."

Robert McDonald: "It’s about making a good experience. How can we showcase our services...so no matter where you are you can figure out what’s going on...that’s the harder part, being an organization that was very space-based before, we have had to take up those services virtually. I think everybody needs to take the time that we do have to rest and to find some time to unwind from the daily routines of this semester, which was very difficult. Because we need to be prepared for the longer term of supporting next semester and into the summer.”

CW: “Since March, we’ve known that reimagining our community as either remote or hybrid would be challenging.”

ML: “But it also gave us the chance to experiment with providing different ways for the community to access our services and resources.”

CW: “And when we’re back together in-person again, we’ll be more resilient and able to use everything we’ve learned to support an information-empowered world.”

ML: “We want to acknowledge that Claire and I have been working on this episode for many months.”

CW: “So if you’re listening to this episode three months from now, there may have been changes to the library's operations from the date this story originally aired.”

ML: “And the topics covered and voices featured in this episode are only a sampling of stories from this past year. There are many, many people to thank for moving operations forward during this unprecedented time.”