Today I attended a session of ALA Virtual Conference about reopening libraries with two speakers.

The first speaker, George Coe, is head of Brodart, an important company for library supplies. The second speaker was Dana Hollins, an Industrial Hygienist. (Who knew this field existed? She’s a member of the American Industrial Hygiene Association.)

George Coe told about their experiences of shutting down and reopening at Brodart, but to me that didn’t really apply to the issues libraries face. They had to reconsider their workflow procedures to be able to apply social distancing. The most relevant information is that they have added helpful supplies to their inventory such as face masks and wipes. So now these can be ordered through a library supplier. They also made some book lists for libraries that are appropriate for the times.

The talk by Dana Hollins, however, was very relevant. I didn’t realize that a document exists with guidelines for reopening. It’s at backtoworksafely.org. Scroll down to find the library document. This is intended to be a living document, so do send any feedback to the American Industrial Hygiene Association.

I’ll continue with the points I jotted down from her talk:

Considerations before reopening:
Stay in touch with your local health department.
Consider conducting a Hazard Assessment.
Think about the different activities and services.
The main route of transmission is person-to-person droplets, so you want to minimize close personal contact.
Communicate to library patrons, and train staff to communicate as well.
Ease back into operation in phases, and re-evaluate at each stage.

Steps to minimize a hazard:

Elimination
Switch to virtual events.
Encourage staff to work from home where possible.
Consider customer screening such as temperature checks.
Encourage staff to stay home if not feeling well. Encourage customers to do the same (with signs).
Post signs at the library entrance and throughout the library.

Engineering
Separate work locations or use plexiglass.
Increase ventilation/fresh air where possible.
Increase filter efficiency.
Install or use Portable HEPA Filtration Units
Limit personal fan use.

Administrative
Consider staggering shifts or limiting the number of patrons in the library.
Maintain physical distance.
Limit personal contact.
Evaluate/change work practices.
Encourage personal hygiene (hand washing).
Enhance cleaning and disinfecting.
Isolate book returns. (72 hours is great.)

PPE
Wear disposable gloves when disinfecting surfaces. (This is to protect you from the disinfectant chemicals, not from the virus.)
Wear face coverings.

In the Q&A session, a few more points came up:

They’re most concerned about hard nonporous surfaces. Things that people touch or where they breathe should get cleaned.

The virus can’t go through skin. So keep good hand hygiene. Face shields are an option if you can’t wear a mask.

Someone asked about magazines, and she repeated the quarantine advice of 72 hours as the best way to deal with paper. (This is problematic for magazines.)

Another session I attended today at ALA Virtual Conference was called Civic Duty? Libraries and the Disenfranchised. The speakers were Katharine Ellera, an international legal advisor on enfranchisement, Nicole Porter from The Sentencing Project, and Leslie Purdie, who works in a prison library.

The presentation was packed with facts, which I couldn’t write down quickly enough. But I’ll give some highlights here:

Disenfranchisement isn’t only about not having the legal right to vote. It’s also about barriers to voting. Many differrent groups around the world face barriers such as: people with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities, indigenous peoples, internally displaced persons, those with criminal convictions, women, ethnic minorities. In America, many states don’t even allow international observers, which is a huge red flag. There are undue obstacles for many segments of the population.

A lot was said about the disenfranchisement of people convicted of a felony — in many states that’s for life. In some states, this penalty is only for certain crimes — and the crimes were chosen as ones black people were more likely to commit. Crimes that more often are committed by white people don’t have the same penalty. In one state (I forget which one), you’d lose your right to vote for beating your wife, but not for murdering her.

There have been recent reforms — but many of the people affected — out of prison and living in communities — don’t know that their voting rights were restored.

Voting is a prosocial activity. When former prisoners are allowed to vote, it reduces recidivism.

Libraries can partner with local organizations such as the local Elections Board or nonpartisan groups like the League of Women Voters to get information into the community about voting rights.

It’s always good to hear “Maria” from Sesame Street! Sonia Manzano was talking about her new picture book with National Geographic Kids, A World Together.

It’s a book about empathy, with photographs of kids from all over the world.

Our world is surely interconnected. She mentioned the song they used to sing on Sesame Street about “Co-operation makes it happen….” Working together is the best way to go — but now it’s seen as a sign of weakness.

Children mimic the behavior of denigrating co-operation. It’s more important than ever to show the value of co-operation.

This is her first book working with photographs, so she reflected on the power of images. She remembered her own fascination with photos of Puerto Rico when she was a kid. Her parents were from there, but she’d never been. Photos bring depth.

She hopes it helps kids not to be fearful of kids who don’t look like them. This is a celebration of everybody in the world.

Images in books give children room to use their imaginations.

I attended a session at ALA Virtual Conference today called Are the Kids Okay? How Librarians Can Use Literature to Help Kids Navigate Socioemotional Stress. The moderator was Kelly Jensen, and the panelists were three young adult authors who have all experienced mental illness and write about teens with mental illness.

I. W. Gregorio has written None of the Above, and her new book is This Is My Brain in Love.

Ashley Woodfolk has written The Beauty That Remains, and her new book is When You Were Everything, about a friendship break-up.

Adib Khorram has wrtten Darius the Great Is Not Okay, and his new book is Darius the Great Deserves Better.

The panelists were asked what influenced them to write books dealing with mental health.

IG: She saw her 10-year-old daughter dealing with some of the same things she had. She wanted to write a story about anxiety and depression that has a pathway to joy. People before diagnosis think they aren’t depressed enough to seek treatment if they’re not suicidal.

AK: He, too, wanted to write a story about living with depression without being suicidal. He doesn’t like calling books “light” or “heavy.” Like life, books run the gamut of experiences and can have plenty of both.

AW: She experienced many friendship break-ups and didn’t have language for it. She wanted to give kids who experience that a place to land. It turns out “Best Friends Forever” isn’t so easy to achieve.

Then there was some general talk about what librarians can do to help kids understand their own mental health.

The answers involved giving kids language to talk about what their feeling and resources to help give them language.

Also raise awareness, bring in experts. And raise awareness with parents, too. Help guide kids to resources passively so they don’t have to explain themselves.

IG: “Librarians are stealth therapists.”

Also, be honest with young people. Encourage journal-making and art — especially during these stressful times.

I liked this idea: For quarantine TikTok videos, challenge kids to do an interpretive dance of their favorite book!

A highlight of my experience of ALA Virtual Conference today was hearing Stacey Abrams speak in the President’s Program. Stacey Abrams’ mother was a librarian, so she’s part of the family!

Here are my notes from her talk, as I frantically tried to get down her major points. (She talks quickly.)

We’re in the midst of two massive conversations. One is about Covid-19, disease and how it disproportionately affects African Americans. The other is about systemic ineqalities.

We need to call out the injustice, and then be intentional about remembering it rather than just going on to the next thing.

Solutions: Reformation and Transformation

For Reformation, we need to follow best practices that work in other nations. For transformation, we need to channel public moneys to address inequities in healthcare and education.

Then the moderator asked about voting rights. Voting is the most fundamental power for citizens in a democracy.

Racism is a disease in our country. Voting is the treatment that actually makes (slow) progress. It’s not a panacea, but a treatment that must be repeated, like chemotherapy.

We can’t divorce the vote from the necessity of protest. We need protest in the street and the vote both. Voting doesn’t solve all our problems, but silence damns us all.

The act of voting is about persistence, not perfection.

For targeted communities, voting is an arduous challenge.

We need to pay attention to the system, not just to politicians. One person isn’t going to be a hero who saves us.

She also talked about the Census, because it’s also an equity issue. The census shapes the next decade of equity and political power. The census determines who is here and what we need. The neediest places are least likely to be seen or heard.

She supports Fair Fight for voting rights and Fair Count for census rights.

1) Libraries are essential for supporting the census, because they’re a trusted resource.
2) The resources for funding libraries comes from the census, so they feed themselves when they feed the census.
3) Libraries need to help tell the truth about who we are.

Then the conversation shifted to talk about her book. It talks about history and challenges, as well as what things look like today. It also talks about America’s role on the world stage.

We need to hold our leaders responsible, and we each need to make our country stronger. Libraries need to amplify voices that unite our nation. And we need to address systemic challenges.

As a profession, we need to work at reflecting the diversity of America. Diversity occurs because you remove barriers to entry and build strategies to overcome them.

Librarians should advertise ourselves! Be intentional about cultivating leadership.

The final question is what is she reading? (How refreshing when a politician can truthfully answer that question!) The answers were Evicted, by Matthew Desmond, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James

Today I attended a session called Herstory through Activism: Women, Libraries, and Activism at ALA Virtual Conference. The moderator was Sherre Harrington, and panelists were Emily Drabinski, Dalena Hunter, and Teresa Y. Neely. The occasion is the 50th anniversary of ALA’s Feminist Task Force.

Each panelist spoke separately, then they answered some questions together. They pointed out that workers in the library field are mostly women, but the leadership is mostly men. And libraries are racialized spaces — overwhelmingly white. Women of color who do work in libraries tend to be in the lower-paid positions.

They talked abot the history of activism in libraries, and work of specific librarians to document African American history.

They talked about how Black women experience a doubling of oppressions. And neither feminist organizations nor black liberation movements really saw them. Teresa Neely talked about the Cumbahee River Collective of 1974-1980. They articulated that if you belong to both groups, you don’t belong at all. “Colorblind” attitudes violently remove people from the conversation.

We need to get rid of the idea that libraries are neutral spaces and acknowledge we’re part of a system, acknowledge our privileges.

This was recorded in May, but one of the panelists brought up the problem of black people murdered by the police. She was the only black librarian at her workplace, and when an incident happens, her colleagues didn’t even see it as an issue affecting them, while she was profoundly moved.

We need to be aware that libraries still need to do a lot of work.

The last session I attended today at ALA Virtual Conference was author Matthew Cordell talking about writing his first picture book biography, Hello, Neighbor about Fred Rogers.

I have the book sitting in my house ready to review (positively), and it was fun to get a peek behind the scenes.

He played the opening song for us, and we were all transported back to our childhoods.

He talked about the things he loved about the show as a child: Special guests, how people make things, Trolley, the Neighborhood of Make Believe.

In 2008, he became a father. When his daughter watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he noticed new things to love about it: Calm, quiet moments, crafts, feeding fish, showing warmth and wonder, music everywhere, appreciating the arts, love and admiration for children, and inclusion and diversity.

When he did a little research, he found out that was Fred Rogers’ true personality showing on his show and he wanted to write and illustrate a picture book biography about him.

It was his first nonfiction book, so he “looked for the helpers” to make it happen.

Through all of this, it was fun to see slides of his drawings and pictures of his research trips to Pittsburgh where he saw some things actually used on the show.

Figures like Fred can bring peace in these times.

Look out for each other!

I attended a panel presentation at ALA Virtual Conference 2020 about libraries serving the transgender community. Here are some of the ideas I took away from the session:

How can we make libraries a more welcoming place for LGBTQ people?

Use gender neutral terms.
Wear a pin with your own pronouns. (Little things like that show you are approachable.)
Don’t ask invasive questions.
Be intentional about being welcoming.
Actively build connections with local organizations such as PFLAG, Pride, and more. They can help you bring in speakers, and then they will see the library as a resource.
Don’t silence trans stories.
Put Trans stories on book displays. Let people know they are there and available.
Go over institutional policies that are obstacles. Getting a library card — is it easy to change your name and gender? Are your only options for gender binary?
Do your own research — you don’t have to make the LGBTQ people you know educate you.
We hope the bathroom is a given at this point. It’s a basic starting point and a human right.
Those local organizations that you’ve gotten to know — have them come in and tell you if there are changes you should make.
Make resources more available — such as name change and gender change resources.
Have programs all year round, not only in June.
In an effort to present both sides, don’t give a place to denying trans people’s existence.
Find even small things to show the library is a safe place.

Listening to Sophia Thakur speak for ALA’s Virtual Conference was an inspirational event for me, despite the woodchipper running outside my window here at home.

Sophia Thakur is a performance poet from the United Kingdom. She’s got a lovely voice and a beautiful accent, and much of this session was her performing her poetry, some even with musical accompaniment.

But she was especially inspiring for this youth services librarian listener as she talked about giving young people a voice through writing and reflecting the experiences of young people. The whole talk was poetic and lovely. I’ll list some beautiful quotes I was able to jot down:

Libraries are sacred places. After fasting, it’s a full plate.
They are tools for escape.
They remind us the world is bigger than our own.
The escape she found at the library enriched her reality.
Books deposit the option to re-exist.
Libraries are big maternity wards.
She holds mirrors up for people with her poetry.
Quotes are like holding hands to keep us together.
Poetry in school is taught as a science, but poetry is in everything.
Writing is easy. Living is the hard part.
She wants you to read her poems and see yourself.
Literacy is this profound tool to explore ourselves.

The featured speaker for ALA Virtual Conference’s Opening Session was Misty Copeland, who was the first African American female principal dancer for the American Ballet Theatre.

She was talking about her new book, Bunheads, about her own experience starting in ballet at the “late age” of 13. The ballet studio where she began was a “little group of misfits” — not people of privilege, and not necessarily like people you usually see on the stage. She wants children to see that diversity and that everyone can be involved in ballet.

When she was a child, she was extremely introverted and didn’t really speak. Writing was how she expressed herself before movement came into her life. Speaking in front of people was a bigger transition than writing, but she does appreciate having a platform.

As an introverted child, she spent much time in the library, and it was a safe haven in every way.

The book introduces many diverse characters including a boy. She wants to give the message that dancers are athletic and powerful. There’s so much power in the images we see and power in representation.

She wants to bring ballet to a wider variety of people.