When My Library Closed Four Years Ago

If we're looking back to four years ago:

March 17th 2020 was a Tuesday night, and I work the evening shifts at my library those Tuesdays. That meant I have a desk turn at the Information desk, which also doubles as the checkout desk. There's often two of the part-time Library Assistants working the shift with me: one on desk and the other performing book processing, special project works, or reshelving.

The library itself was rather quiet. The COVID-19 pandemic had gone global back in January and by February we were seeing the signs in Florida. One interesting thing to note was how most our patrons (library users) are seniors from the surrounding retirement communities, and a lot of them had already begun sheltering at home well before March as the early reports had COVID being near-fatal to older people.

It may have been quiet but I had been busy all day, handling administrative duties as our Library Director position was vacant since 2018 (My previous experience as head of a library in another county did not go well, so I took it as a temp). I recall working on collection management of one of the non-fiction ranges, and then prepping for a One-On-One tutorial session (duties as the Reference Librarian) that ended up cancelling (they weren't sick, I remember that, they just didn't want to risk it).

When I started my desk shift at 5:00PM, I checked my work emails. I had two: Library and City. The Library email kept up with staff's last-minute schedule changes, any reports for what our Children's Librarian was lining up for that June's Summer Reading Program, notifications about patron complaints, in-house stuff. The City email was for the directorial duties to the city's operations, any notifications from the Manager, reports from the City Clerk, administrative stuff. The library system for the county used a different network than the city, hence the separate emails.

So it wasn't until 5:20PM when I got to the email from the City Manager's office sent at 4:00PM that everything was shutting down citywide due to the pandemic at 5:00PM.

/headdesk

<--- always the last to know

I told my part-timers as soon as I read that email. We roamed the library floors informing any remaining patrons - there were two on computers, a mother and child in Children's shelves, one reading in the Magazines area, nobody upstairs - that the library had to close early that night. One of the assistants checked the book drop while I worked on signage for the front doors, and then sent emails to all the staff about our work situation the next morning (library was closed to public, staff still had to work).

We had been expecting something about closing down. Other city libraries - we have a cooperative system, the cities manage their own library - had already closed a week or two prior. Those were the small libraries, with few staff - some of whom had caught COVID ergo the closings - on hand. They had every reason to close earlier in the month.

Thing about a library: we were... are a public facility, with hundreds of people going in and out all day, a pandemic hotspot, one of the worst places a virus could spread. As federal and state emergency agencies were begging elected officials to do the right thing, it was just a question of when, and that Tuesday afternoon was it for us.

By the time we finished locking up and shutting down, it was after 6:00PM. I remember standing in the parking lot, staring at the library and then circling around at everything else - a city lake behind the library, the little league ballpark across the street, the civic center just a ways over, one of those retirement communities to the far side of the ballpark, all part of a small quiet town in the middle of Florida - and just wondered what the hell was going to happen next. There was nobody else outside, even at sunset there were usually families in the surrounding neighborhood walking around the parks but not that night. Everyone was at home (or the grocery stores raiding whatever toilet paper was left), everyone was waiting for the next terrifying thing.

The day after we got instructions from our city's Emergency team - the firefighters did double-duty on that - about how we had to clean our workplaces, perform daily check-ins for fever and cough, required masking even as we were closed to the public. The plan - the hope - was to reopen to the public by late April, depending on how we could restructure the library to cut down on viral spreads.

We transferred everything we had on hold to Books-by-Mail as best we could. We started book pickups for drive-thru to the front door. We wiped everything down with cleaning solutions as much as possible. We dealt with co-workers calling in sick - some with COVID itself - though thankfully we never shared an outbreak amongst ourselves. We obeyed the recommendations and performed our duty to the library patrons.

That was four years ago. Everything changed, and some of it didn't get better.

Especially as trump - driven by ignorance, desperate to restart a shut-down economy to avoid making himself look bad, and unable to project any semblance of calm leadership - kept getting worse as COVID got worse.

But that's for another time.

Four years ago, everything for me shut down.