Snapshot of a School Library During COVID-19 #24

Margaret Lawson, Head of Library and Information Services at Our Lady of Sion College, shares the strategies the library has used to the support the school community during COVID-19 restrictions.

What has been the focus for your school library/role during the COVID-19 Crisis?
Maintain as many of the services as possible by moving them online. We signed up to Libguides and produced instructional videos showing staff and students how to access our eResources.

What major tasks have you achieved?
Development of our Libguide site, maintaining our Wider Reading program via Google Meet and maintaining Student Interest Groups such as Library Helpers and Writers Groups.

What has been the result for staff and/or students?
Increased borrowing and involvement in accessing online resources. We also created a Weekly Staff newsletter which highlighted any Subject Libguides that we had developed, Clickview resources, eBook resources and interesting links for staff.

What reactions did you get from students/teachers/school leaders/parents to what the library staff were doing?
The development of a Library weekly newsletter for staff signalled a significant change in our workflow, but it brought us the opportunity to promote what we do each week in the Library as often we are silent achievers and even more so when we are all working from home.
We documented statistics for borrowing, development of Libguides, Victorian Premiers' Reading Challenge participation, Sion Writers Group participation, New Clickview Videos and also worthwhile links to cool digital tools that teachers could use online.
It cut down on all staff emails (which was appreciated by staff) and provided a focus for the team each week to complete tasks in a timely manner. We included images and feedback from staff and students in this newsletter.

What other information would you like us to know?
During lockdown, the team mostly worked from home and as a team we met each morning at 10am via Google Meet to keep in touch with who was working on what. As we developed our Click and Collect "Borrow Bags" service, we then had 1-2 days onsite to manage these. During lockdown we also managed to a stocktake of the collection, the first one done in a number of years!