Personally, I just don’t know where the summer went. While the early months of the shutdown seemed to drag on, August flew by and before I knew it, the early mornings became chilly and September was here. September rather than January has always felt like the beginning of the new year for me. Maybe because it continues to mark the start of a new academic year. This year, September will be memorable because we are entering Phase 2 of our smart library restart initiative and we have reached 25 weeks of primarily remote work.
Some of you have been coming into the library during Phase 1 and because of this Phase 2 won’t seem that much different except for longer weeks or days. Others of you will be just reentering the library for the first time since the shutdown and will be surprised by the construction and safety protocols in place. There has been tremendous progress made by all of your efforts. For example, since late June we have reviewed and ascertained ownership for 1,381 serial titles and 6,767 monograph titles. For serials, the majority are BML-owned (64%) and for monographs, the majority is HML (also 64%). Only a small amount of items had no ownership information – 2% for the serials and 3% for the monographs. And, we have received many comments from various staff that this process has given them a deeper understanding of the richness of our legacy collections.
All of you are wondering how this new phase will work. By now, you should all have received your onsite work schedule. Len and the Library’s Implementation Team are finishing up details for expanded onsite work, developing new check-in sheets, and revising captain duties. Last week’s message introduced the rationale and broad concepts of Phase 2 re-entry. This week’s message continues to discuss Phase 2 re-entry, filling in some information we did not have last week, and offering more specific details.
However you are feeling, whatever onsite tasks you are asked to perform, whenever you are scheduled to be onsite, wherever you are situated for onsite work (CHOM, Lahey Room, Admin Suite, etc.), please know that we are each alone and working together, responding to the information needs of our faculty, staff, and students. I thank you for all your efforts to provide outstanding quality reference, research, instruction, collections, and web-site resources despite these difficult and challenging times. See you soon.
Elaine