What can York County expect when libraries open this week? Look at Lancaster County.
On Tuesday, the first morning it opened, a mother and her young son walked into the Kershaw Branch public library.
They’d driven an hour from their home in Fort Mill, and were two of about 30 people who’d visited the library before noon. They were there to check out books.
“She said we were the only library that she could find open,” Susan Gandy, manager of the library, said. Gandy then laughed: “But she just needed to get out of the house.”
Last week, the downtown Lancaster and Kershaw public libraries began welcoming visitors through their doors, part of the first stage of the three-phase plan to reopen Lancaster County amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The return of libraries in Lancaster has highlighted their importance — and served as an early case study as other counties and municipalities continue down their own paths toward normalcy, including York County, which starts a phased reopening plan Monday. York County libraries’ book drops will reopen for returns first. Then, the libraries will open curbside pickup, and in the final stage, visitors can go into the libraries on a limited basis.
“It’s been extremely manageable,” Rita Vogel, the director of the Lancaster branch, said. “People are pacing themselves, and it’s worked out well.”
One reason it’s been manageable, Vogel and Gandy said, is because the libraries have taken precautions.
Staff members take peoples’ temperatures at the door and returned books are quarantined for five days. No more than eight people are allowed in the public areas at one time, Vogel said.
The libraries are open for limited hours. The main branch library, which is currently at a temporary location on Colonial Commons Court while the main library’s facilities are being renovated, is open Monday, Wednesday and Friday, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Kershaw branch is open Tuesday and Thursday during the same hours.
“We’re mostly getting a lot of phone calls, ‘When are you going to open?’” Vogel said. “So there’s a definite missing us here and people really appreciate our soft opening.”
What libraries do, who they serve
Libraries serve different purposes for different people.
For those at both the Kershaw and Lancaster branch libraries, a majority of visitors in the first days were readers, Gandy and Vogel said. A good amount of visitors also spent their allotted 45 minutes at the Lancaster library using computers, which are spaced at least 6 feet apart.
“Even simple things, like printing out copies from their thumb drive, getting to a computer and doing an application,” Vogel said. “It’s those kinds of things that they really miss.”
For others, though — from the unemployed, to the homeless — libraries are essential sites that weren’t available amid the coronavirus.
Pathways Community Center in Rock Hill is a single point that connects people in crisis with proper community service agencies. The organization’s executive director told The Herald that local public libraries provide an oasis where the homeless and otherwise marginalized can gather and get information.
“When the virus first broke out and the library closed, they relied on us to give them information because they couldn’t go anywhere and get it,” Grace Lewis said. “But the library does that for them.”
Lewis said many unemployed workers use libraries to search for jobs and check on their social security and stimulus benefits.
“A lot of people think, ‘Well, they’re homeless, but they have a phone,’” Grace said. “Many of them don’t. That’s where they get information on current events.”
Pathways has not closed amid the coronavirus pandemic, and none of their customers have gotten sick, Lewis said.
Planning beyond the coronavirus
One of the most important functions of a library is serving the area’s students by helping make education equitable.
Elizabeth Bryant, the Lancaster County school district’s instructional specialist for technology, told The Herald that just because libraries temporarily closed doesn’t mean that the services they provide stopped.
“As librarians, the knowledge and the information we provide moves beyond the library walls at all times,” Bryant said. “So whether we’re in a school house, or whether we’re at home, we’ve continued to provide resources for our staff and students to help with research needs, to help with technology needs, to help with personal reading.”
Bryant also said the pandemic has initiated many important discussions with workers at the Lancaster County School District about education equity.
“I think our county is unique because we have different pockets: urban, suburban and rural,” Bryant said. “The real positive is it’s started discussions about how we can look toward the future. Hopefully not for this type of situation again, but learning in general.
“Our normal end-of-year tasks aren’t the same, but it kind of gives us a time of reflection, hopefully, and to think about the way we’ve been doing things and maybe how we can change some things. Even as we goal-set this past week, we met online and our goal-setting was, ‘If we were to face something similar, or something else in the future, what do we do?’
“How did we address this, and how can we address this in the future? What role can everybody play? Those kinds of things.”
This story was originally published May 18, 2020 at 5:04 AM.
.jpeg)