Snapshot of a School Library During COVID-19 #20

School libraries during covid

The Library Team at Brighton Grammar School, Lêna Hume-Twining, Ruth Silva and Katrina Holgyee, share what they have been doing in their school library during COVID-19.

Our role during the COVID-19 Crisis has been to bring our library community online and our focus has been on promoting our #BGSReadsTogether initiative.

We have achieved 3 major tasks as part of our #BGSReadsTogether initiative. Firstly, we created a Padlet for our students to share their thoughts on what they were reading during lockdown, and for our staff we established a recommended reading column in the weekly staff bulletin. Secondly, we implemented Click & Collect: our pick-up and drop-off book service that enables students and staff to continue borrowing books, whilst practicing safe hygiene and physical distancing. Thirdly, we produced a series of how-to videos that demonstrated how to access and navigate our online library of eBooks and audiobooks, as well as our digital subscriptions to newspapers, magazines and databases.

The result for students and staff has been consistency in the services and resources we provide. As the COVID-19 Crisis unfolded and we began planning to move our library community online, we identified consistency in our approach as essential at this time of significant uncertainty. Our message to students and staff has not changed: the library is open and the library team is ready to help.

The reactions from the wider school community to what BGS Libraries have been doing has been wholehearted.


"The library has helped me personally keep in touch with other students, in particular with our weekly library committee meetings. Over the past few weeks we have shared our favourite childhood books (mine is Tintin), discussed a hypothetical book we would write during this period (mine would just be a book with Trump’s tweets), and our favourite fictional character of all time (mine is Basil Fawlty). These meetings have helped keep me connected and it is nice to check in with other library committee members."
Eric Stone
BGS student


"I enjoy reading and use the library a lot to try out different books normally, so Click & Collect gave me a chance to continue doing this. It gave me more books to read, especially as the weather turns wetter and colder! It is also a good break from looking at a screen all day."
David Liddle
BGS teacher and parent

If you would like to let us know what your school library is doing during COVID-19, you can let us know here.

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