Alden library remains closed on an empty campus, along with the rest of Ohio University.
Just as classes have gone online, the librarians and student staff members have worked hard to take their services online as well. Although some services were already offered through a live chat available via the library's website, all services have now gone digital, Kelly Broughton, assistant dean for research and education for University Libraries, said.
“We have student employees who are working on the front lines answering questions via chat along with the staff, each of them all from home,” Broughton said.
Joey Walden, a student employee coordinator at Alden, said that one of the main concerns of the coordinators was finding meaningful work for student employees during this time.
“What I've been doing with my students is we're working a lot with finding ways for customer service,” Walden said. “We're using the library resources that we have available.”
This includes looking up articles for patrons, assisting through chat and building customer service skills. Specifically, Walden said there has been a focus on building soft skills, like Microsoft Excel, that students may not have the most time to build during the typical school year.
For some of the students who work at the library, like archive intern Jade Braden, a junior studying English, this has made a big impact on their work.
Previously, a lot of Braden’s work was centered around an inventory track, cataloging and going through items in the Charles Bukowski collection, a collection of an author of which the library has nearly 400 items.
“I've just been going through that catalog and what we have, what we don't have, what condition it's in, what we could look to make part of our collection in the future and reworking a lot of index and guide documents that we have because some of them were as old as 1972, and stuff had been added since then,” Braden said.
Through this work, Braden even discovered an undocumented piece of the collection that the library had acquired but had never been cataloged.
Braden’s work on this project was interrupted due to COVID-19, as most of it consists of working with the physical archives of the library. Currently, she is working on the webpage for research on the collection.
For others like Danni Grottla, a junior studying English literature and writing, the transition to continue work off campus has been a bit smoother. Grottla’s work focuses on children’s books in the library’s collection that are written by female authors or for young girls, and more recently, helping the rare books collections seek out work from Appalachian authors.
“It hasn't been too terrible of a transition,” Grottla said. “I was very lucky, because … most of my research is done online anyway because I can use the online catalog through the library’s website and kind of hunt through stuff. Then I pretty much just search all my stuff online trying to find the book series and authors.”
Like many of those who work in the library, Grottla misses being able to physically be in the library.
“I really don't like not being surrounded by all the books,” Grottla said, “definitely not as much fun sitting in, doing it sitting at my kitchen table.”
Walden said a lot of the library's focus was on serving its patrons as well as it always has.
“It was kind of weird at first because we're so person-to-person oriented that switching online, I think, a lot of us had a little bit of a fear of ‘Will we still be impactful to our patrons?’” Walden said. “One of the things we found was we're still able to provide the services, not the same service as we did before, but we're able to help people find electronic resources. We're still there when people need to look for articles. We're still there when people need a little bit of help with citations, and we’re there to help connect people to their subject librarian. A lot of it's just been trying to figure out how to adapt appropriately.”
