Date: 6/4/2021
As the Holyoke Public Library prepares to reopen its doors to the public on June 14, 2021, the Library employees join our colleagues from Brookline and many other public libraries in expressing our appreciation to the city officials and the Public Health Department for keeping the primary focus on the safety of our citizens and city employees, including the library staff throughout the pandemic.
The library staff is also grateful and thankful for the library board of directors and our caring patrons for advocating for our library employees and looking after the health and safety of our staff and patrons by donating hard to find PPE, making sure we have a safe workplace for the staff while providing curbside services to many for the past year.
2020 was a year of learning for all of us. Since March of 2020, when everything came to a halt, the public library employees quickly had to improvise and learn how to continue serving our patrons while complying with social distancing and the stay-at-home mandates. By June, we learned to work from home, meet via different online platforms, provide online programs like story-time and other interactive programs via Facebook, offered virtual programs via Zoom, provided activity kits to keep children busy during the stay-at-home mandates, several online resources were added to our digital collections to help with remote learning from home, getting library books and audio-visuals in the hands of our patrons via curbside services, offered reference interactions, research and reader’s advisory via telephone and/or emails, as well as patrons learning to fax and send print jobs via their smartphones or other electronic devices. A year of many lessons learned, and improvement.
We miss our library patrons, and our library staff have done their best to serve the citizens of Holyoke and surrounding areas safely over the past year. We are grateful that we have been able to do so in a safe environment, and we look forward to welcoming our community back into the public libraries in June!
Holyoke Public Library staff
