The Boston and Maine Connection: The library as a conduit of connection for community.
Times of adversity stretch you. And these are certainly times that are stretching all of us. Everything we hold as constant has seen disruption and upheaval these last few months. Uncertainty and frustration linger. All but essential personnel are generally staying home though the pressure to emerge is great. And, despite the growth of video conferencing, we continue to hunger for real human connection.
Topsham Public Library’s Executive Director Susan Preece and I explored the question, “How do you get a community together when you are not physically in the building?”
We started our conversation from the jointly held belief that “A library is a conduit of information and connectivity for a community.” Connecting with people one on one was something she and her staff would not give up on so they explored the many ways they could find to “do whatever it is we do together” and keep doing it. She and her staff focused on the fact that they were all here and very much here for the community. She was emphatic that “seeing people we recognize,” is important and so they set out to keep those visual connections real.
They created “Hello Topsham” and invited the community to send photos of themselves in their new normal. Susan successfully encouraged her staff to share work from home photos. I can attest to the fact that many of them prefer to remain off camera and so, for the good of community, they were stretching themselves in the same way we have all been asked to stretch.
They emphasized people helping each other; tech support from Dale. The children’s librarian, now the Digital Miss Mariah, looking very much herself with her kind and caring ways projecting onto a six minute video with the expected morning story time for her little friends and their parents to enjoy together, it was there, just as always, even if not exactly as it was. There was even a weekly Zoom hangout where you could drop in and talk about just about anything but the “thing that is not to be mentioned,” allowing for peace and sanity in the face of the daily news barrage.
They surveyed the community and asked, “what are you looking for? What are you doing? What would be helpful?” They collectively came up with “the Stay at Home Mega List” filled with resources. The library also smartly broke out individual web pages for every age and type of patron from the aforementioned “Digital Miss Mariah” to “teens stay at home” and offered personalized book recommendations that included a category for Neil Gaiman fans & horror fans. Librarian and author Emma Gibbon even moved ahead with her planned book launch during this unplanned pandemic. Here’s my shameless plug for “Dark Blood Comes from the Feet” a collection of 17 short stories by Emma J Gibbon. She is daring and bold and why not be bold at a time like this. She is surrounded by friends and community cheering her on.
And isn’t this what community is all about? People are helping each other, creating a safe space. The great gift of a library is acting as the conduit of information and connection in a community. And our library director re-framed nicely what a library is today:
“Libraries are relevant, they are real. They don’t need to have rooms full of books to be successful or life changing. Libraries are still the great equalizer. They pull us all together in one spot regardless of where we might happen to be.”
You can watch our video conversation at https://bit.ly/TPLcommunicast