Renewable resources
Charles Library innovates in the face of the pandemic
In less than a year, Temple’s state-of-the-art new library building—with its impressive vertical panels of charcoal gray stone, full-length glass windows and soaring curved wooden entrances went from welcoming crowds at its grand opening to closing its physical doors for an
indefinite period of time.
Temple’s newly constructed Charles Library—named in recognition of a $10 million gift from entrepreneur and Temple Trustee Steve Charles, KLN ’80—had been open for less than a year when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020. On Thursday, March 19, at 6 p.m., the facility shut down its public operations. Without knowing how long this first lockdown would last or what the virus itself might mean for daily life in the coming months, library staff felt the weight of the decision.
“We were only starting to see the full potential of the building when we had to close. A big part of my job for the two years prior had been to prepare for, and then open, Charles Library,” said Sara Curnow Wilson, Temple University Libraries’ assistant director of outreach and communications. “The sudden shift from focusing so much on the opportunities presented by our physical spaces to operating in a completely virtual environment was jarring.”
“Charles Library was designed to inspire all those who walked through its doors,” said Joe Lucia, dean of libraries. “When we closed the building in the midst of the citywide quarantine, we had to rethink how to connect with, support and inspire the communities who rely on our services and resources, all from a distance.”
Fortunately, Charles Library was well-positioned to handle an unthinkable crisis and in the coming months, staff would creatively deploy knowledge, technology and human connections to meet the moment.
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“Our first goal when we shut down our physical operations was to expand access to our digital content and improve virtual services,” Wilson said.
While the library had always had robust support and services for faculty and students online, there had never been a time when the entire university required it to function virtually. With the award-winning building closed, a top priority became expanding materials users could get online, whether that meant opening up previously unavailable ebook and journal collections, or applying for HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service, which, when granted, allowed Temple students, faculty and staff digital reading rights to nearly 40% of the library’s print collection.
To ensure that patrons were aware of these changes, the web development team created and maintained a webpage with updates on new resources available throughout the COVID-19 crisis, and a second page that linked online users to the library’s digital resources and collections.
An interdisciplinary team, including public service librarians and library technology staff created a new service: Get Help Finding a Digital Copy. With the addition of a button on the user interface, patrons could request assistance looking for any physical library item in digital form. The button created a ticket that would go into the library’s main help request system.
“We would try to find digital copies from freely available sources like the Internet Archive or HathiTrust, or from the Free Library of Philadelphia, where every Temple community member can get a library card and access online resources, or elsewhere,” says Olivia Given Castello, head of the business, social sciences and education unit and subject librarian for criminal justice and social work. “Librarians from several departments came together to staff the new service.”
The button was launched on April 13, 2020,
and within the first week, the library
had 347 digital copy requests.
“People immediately found it that morning and started to use it,” Castello says. “If we ever had any question as to whether people were using the library catalog online—well, we had our answer!”
In total, as of June 1, 2021, the library has received more than 5,100 Get Help Finding a Digital Copy tickets. In the fall semester the success rate reached a high of 70%—with “success” defined as the ability to find a digital copy already owned, available for free or available for purchase when there was no other option. Castello said that regardless of whether the search was successful or not, patrons appreciated the effort, and the library’s ability to implement the system.
“Even when we have had to tell patrons that we couldn’t find a digital copy, the feedback has been glowing,” she said.
Dana Saewitz, associate professor of instruction in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at the Lew Klein College of Communication, is one such satisfied patron.
“I have been really pleased with the library’s ability to adapt to the pandemic and with the librarians’ ability to access materials remotely and provide those materials to my students and the course reserve system,” she said. “There were many DVDs that I would show every semester in class and I thought, oh, my gosh, how will I do this now that we are all digital and online. The librarians were always engaged and dependable for me and for my students, so that has been a great help during this time.”
Aligning for safety
With COVID-19 cases down, students returning to campus for the fall semester and a strict safety plan in place, Charles Library reopened its doors on Monday, Aug. 3, 2020. To protect the health of visitors and staff, new policies included quarantining materials, physical distancing, mandatory face coverings and more.
Some of the practices that had been established back in the spring when campus buildings were closed, such as longer due dates, no late fines for library materials and expanded alumni access to digital materials, were extended. A contactless book pickup service—available to anyone with a borrowing card—was introduced and continued through September 2021.
Considered the most state-of-the-art library in Pennsylvania, Charles Library easily accommodated physical distancing with its open floor plan, laptop kiosks and workspaces designed to be adaptable for individual devices. At the same time, the library’s participation in the laptop lending program was a boon for students during the pandemic, said Caitlin Shanley, coordinator of learning and student success, helping to improve both access and equity.
Onscreen and on point
Once the pandemic hit, Zoom was suddenly much more than an application—it became a way of life, and the library made great use of video conferencing technology. Librarians had always offered research appointments online, but now class visits were conducted over Zoom as well or generated asynchronously with prerecorded video. Health Sciences Library staff also moved their workshops online, attracting registrants from across Temple, the region and the world, including alumni in California and students from Portugal.
Jennifer Ibrahim, associate dean for academic affairs at the College of Public Health, found that librarian Lauri Fennell’s classroom lessons on misinformation during the pandemic were especially useful to public health students. In general, she said that students seemed to appreciate the library’s efforts to stay accessible during the 2020–2021 school year and many came to use its resources in a new way.
“What’s great about being online is a student can go back to that video tutorial or a webinar or whatever it was when they absolutely need to employ their skills and get refreshed. And from a teaching perspective, that introduction and reinforcement from the library is great. When we were all online, people started going there for more things. And I think it heightened awareness of everything that the library can offer. There’s educational content, there’s cultural content. There’s links to all sorts of databases.”
The library’s instructional designer created some robust online learning modules on library and research skills that faculty could include in online courses.
“It gives students who are coming in on different footing some equality,” Ibrahim said. “If you’ve never been exposed to certain skills, here’s an opportunity that a faculty member may not have time to explain in the class or they may not even think about doing this because they assume the students got this content from someplace else.”
Even with students and faculty back on campus, many continue to engage with the library online, even through social media, with requests for materials coming through Twitter and Instagram. That’s one reason that the online help chat service was expanded to operate 24/7 during the spring 2021 semester.
“We found that students are often working on papers late at night and need support. We will keep that service going as long as we can and as long as there is interest,” Wilson said.
A recent College of Engineering alumnus got a quick answer to their e-resources question from library staff member Andrew Diamond while he was on a chat shift. The patron later wrote that “the library resources have been valuable for entrepreneurship and career development.”
Open to the World Wide Web
Public programs were canceled in spring 2020, but by fall all of the library’s programming—which had always been open to the general public and not just the Temple community—went virtual.
“We were unsure how the audience was going to react to that, if people were tired of Zoom,” said Kaitlyn Semborski, program coordinator for the library’s Outreach and Communications Department. “Going online just meant that we had to get more creative with our programming. We also tried to keep it entertaining and relevant to the moment.”
One such event included projecting a dance performance by Boyer College of Music and Dance students onto the library windows so it could be seen by passersby. Additionally, the yearlong Made in North Philly themed series was especially popular, particularly a February screening of newly unearthed WFIL/WPVI and KYW/CBS3 news footage from the Special Collections Research Center with behind-the-scenes commentary with archivist John Pettit. The footage included Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at the Baptist Temple in 1965 and a Black Power rally at the Church of the Advocate in 1966.
Another event, the symposium titled Modeling the Mind: From Buddhism to Artificial General Intelligence drew viewers from as far as Australia. Event videos, which were posted online afterward, continue to garner views.
In fact, the libraries’ virtual happenings were so widely and well attended that Wilson anticipates online programming will continue in some form indefinitely.
“We will have some hybrid options going forward because we have noticed that we now have an expanded audience,” she said. “By putting events online, we have made them more accessible to people who couldn’t physically be there, and we’ve had a surprising number of people unaffiliated with Temple attending.”
If nothing else, COVID-19 may have given some people reason to reconsider the role of libraries in communities. Even those who already viewed the physical expanse as more than a place to study or research, conceiving of it, in fact, as a center of interpersonal interaction, may not have imagined what could happen when the building itself closed.
“A library, particularly an academic one, is much more than a physical space to go and browse books,” Wilson says. “That’s something we at Charles have known for a long time, and it’s knowledge that we’ve tried to pass on to our users. Our mission is to connect people and ideas, and there are a lot of different ways to do that.
“One way that this past year has impacted our relationship with our users, I hope, is that they’ve realized that the library isn’t just a place where you go, but a knowledge base you can connect with for information, wherever you are,” she added.
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