Month: March 2020

Like many, I found myself setting up what I think of as a “pop-up home office” this week as we all scramble to slow the spread of the coronavirus (#WFH #CatsWorkingFromHome).

I was homeschooled until college, so I’m very used to the personal routines and dispositions that make working from home work for me. Plus I have good technology infrastructure available both at home and from work, and I don’t have kids, so all in all I’m one of the very very lucky ones.

So here’s where I am with this new life (for now, at least).

In the morning before work, I do all my normal calm, quiet, relaxing morning stuff in my living room as usual, snuggled on the couch with the cat. I knit while watching last night’s Colbert Show and Daily Show on YouTube, I read, I sip tea… When it’s time to get ready for work I get dressed, make my bed, eat breakfast, and brush my teeth.

Then I go to work … which is now at my kitchen table, complete with my actual office plant (and a co-worker’s office plant). I don’t have a good office chair at home, but I’ve found that a towel folded on my kitchen chair seat works very nicely. As a bonus, my workspace has windows for the first time in 15 years! And nobody thinks it’s weird that I like working with a blanket over my legs.

After work, I close my work laptop and turn off my work stuff, and then I move back into my living room…. where I open my home laptop and turn on my home stuff. My cat looks on in quiet bafflement, but it’s a pattern that works for me.

And this is how things will be for the next while, I think.

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I have colleagues who are doing fantastic work with information gathering and dissemination for our various publics, so I’ve let them get on with that. Management folks are all scrambling to figure out big things like what kinds of access and services we can safely provide, and how to adjust practices for increased safety, so I’m letting them get on with that.

So here’s what I’ve been up to.

• I’ve started a task list called “When This Is All Over” where I keep track of stuff I’ll need to change back once our college resumes normal-ish operations.
• I’ve offered my services as a test participant in virtual meeting/instruction platforms that our faculty and staff are learning and setting up right now in preparation for online-only instruction.
• I’ve tested my VPN and will take my laptop and headphones home with me whenever I’m not working at the library. (My phone sends audio files to my email, so I’ll just let it keep doing that.)
• My colleagues and I are using email, chat, and video chat where we used to pop into each others’ offices. Or else we’re standing outside each others’ offices talking from a distance. (Starting tomorrow we’ll rotate so only one of us at a time is on campus, and only healthy/low-risk people are in the rotation.)

I also have a couple of specialized roles that suddenly required action:

• Copyright
  • I’m the chair of our campus’ copyright team, so we had to get a decision from College administration about how much they’re comfortable taking on the risk of uncharted legal territory vs instruction upheaval. Once we got that answer my team and I started drafting guidance for our campus that will hopefully be posted by the end of the day, or tomorrow. (Meanwhile, check out the extremely helpful Public Statement of Library Copyright Experts: Fair Use & Emergency Remote Teaching & Research and Nancy Sims’ CC-BY guidance for the University of Minnesota on Rapidly Shifting Your Course from In-Person to Online.)
  • Working from within what’s legal and within campus policy, I also worked with library administration to draft a statement about practical availability of library resources. (Not everything that is possible is practical, or possible within the staffing and infrastructure available.) And no, this isn’t comprehensive and there are a lot of unanswered questions still, but for right now the statement reads:
    “The Gould Library provides access to many physical as well as digital materials, and in some cases the physical materials may not be practical or available for online teaching. Your Liaison Librarian can work with you to investigate whether alternative content is accessible that would help you achieve your learning goals. Your liaison can also help you create stable links to online materials that will work for you and your students, whether on campus or off.”
• I’m in charge of our LibApps stuff so…
  • I’ve been getting virtual meeting URLs into the librarians’ automated scheduling systems. (This is a local document, but it explains how we’re putting a virtual meeting URL into LibCal and LibGuides, and here’s what it looks like live.)
  • In LibGuides I replicated the alert text from our main library website (many thanks to Grand Valley State University for sharing how they managed this so that I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel). Other libraries are able to put similar code into their LibGuides Headers, which would be easier, but our local header functions in a way that wouldn’t allow for that so I put it on every page layout instead. You can put something similar at the bottom of your system’s header code, or (like me) after the line in your page layouts that ends in {{breadcrumbs}} </nav>
    Here’s what the alert code it looks like:
    <div class="alert alert-warning">
<p>YOUR TEXT HERE</p>
</div>
    If you don’t normally do this kind of thing and you want step-by-step help, just let me know.

What practical steps are you implementing?

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