I’m very very lucky in a lot of ways. Just a few of those ways include having a job that I can do from home, not having child care as part of my work-from-home life, having pets that make life companionable and amusing, having a home that I enjoy being in and a work-from-home area of that home that looks out on a massive bank of lilac bushes that will bloom any time…. and so much more.
Some days are tougher, of course. Anxiety will hit, or my computer will stop allowing me to use one of the two virtual conferencing tools that I rely on, or stuff will feel overwhelming. But for the most part the rhythm of my days are keeping me going, and are well sprinkled with things that bring me joy.
Weekday rhythms
Early morning: Sip tea, watch last night’s Daily Show and Colbert Show, watch yesterday’s video from my pastor, make a couple masks.
Morning: Get a heating pad (for my feet) and a blanket (for my lap), gather a pot of tea and some fruit or nuts, and settle in for work in my “office.” Typically my cat joins me to sleep in the bed I’ve put on a chair next to me.
Lunch: Take a walk while chatting with my sister-in-law on the phone. Eat lunch. Make another pot of tea for the afternoon.
Afternoon: Settle in with my heating pad, blanket, and napping cat for the afternoon. Sometime around 3:30 or 4 the cat will come fully awake and want to be a part of everything, especially everything involving a keyboard that he can sit on. Or a webcam. Webcams are cat magnets.
Evening: Every evening I read one more chapter of a book to the kids from a few families I know (including my nephews). It’s been very amusing to watch a bunch of young kids learn the ins and outs of video conferencing. At this point they mostly handle muting and un-muting themselves quite well, and they do a lot of reacting to the chapter in the chat, which they found themselves. Amazing!
Dinner: Connect with my parents through video chat and have dinner “together” while watching a streaming show of some kind.
Pre-bed: I might go to bed at this point, or I might stay up for a while to make some more masks. It all depends on how tired I am.
I’m a person who lives by rhythm and ritual, and I’ve also always loved the sense of wrapping my house around me like a cozy blanket in the winter. So I’m probably ideally situated for these work-from-home times. But my mind also kind of slips off any attempt to plan how things will go a month from now, or two months, or during Fall term… or next year. I know a lot’s uncertain so living in the moment is probably a pretty good strategy, but sometimes I also wonder if I should work a little harder at making even preliminary plans for farther ahead. Maybe I’ll let too much sneak up on me and have to scramble too hard once that hazy future becomes very real deadlines and calendar invites…. Or maybe it’s ok that I lull myself with the ebb and flow of each day.
I’m currently in my 6th week of working primarily from home and my 4th week working entirely from home. Writing that sentence was an odd experience, actually. It’s the first time I’ve actually quantified my own pandemic self-isolation in that way, and I’m honestly having a hard time coming to terms with those concrete lengths of time. It feels like it’s been a long time, sure, but 6 weeks is far, far longer than I would have guessed. I guess Time has little of the same meaning now that it had in the Before Times.
There are all kinds of things I could write about how I’ve settled into my new work space and work habits here in my kitchen’s dining nook (not least of which is the extra care I have to give to ergonomics). And maybe I will write about some of those things some other time.
One thing that’s struck me, though, is how completely similar my work as a Reference Librarian During Pandemic Times is to my work as a Reference Librarian. I work with heavily text-based departments, and in fact a whole lot of what the researchers in my areas rely on has not been digitized. I’m not as physical-object-based as some others in our library, but I had kind of wondered what it would be like to support these departments without direct access to our physical materials.
And granted, the vast majority of my work in the Before Times involved in-person conversations, and a goodly proportion of those conversations took place in the stacks. And I’ve never enjoyed having to say that something is inaccessible, which now happens more often than it did before. So yes, my work is definitely different.
But what remains exactly the same is that one of the absolute core principles of my work is to help researchers define and scope their information needs within the practicalities of whatever circumstances they’re in. It’s not just, “What research question is manageable within a 10-page paper;” It’s also, “What research question is manageable given the evidence that’s accessible using available time and resources.” I talk about this pretty explicitly with upper level students, but it’s always an undercurrent in conversations with researchers of all levels.
Usually the things that aren’t available to us are physical things that are out of reach because the researcher doesn’t have money or time to travel to a particular archive or special collection. Or materials are inaccessible because they were never publicly available, or they’re classified, or they’re locked down because of privacy reasons… So much of the world’s information is impossible or impractical for use.
The difference is that now the impossible/impractical category has extended to include most of the world’s physical library collections. There’s a ton that’s been digitized, and between libraries working to license more and more of that content and vendors opening up temporary access there really is a lot out there. But of course it’s not everything. It will never be everything.
So then we’re back to the conversations that are actually familiar even while feeling strange — those reference interview questions that are intended to help you and the researcher figure out what the goals of the information need are, and whether those goals could be accomplished with materials that are accessible. And if not, what are some accessible materials that are sufficiently interesting and similar that if we adjust the goals slightly the researcher could have meaningful work to accomplish.
So yeah. Reference interviews can take longer these days, both because we can’t do them face to face and because there are proportionately more that require pretty creative thinking on both sides. But it’s still the good ol’ Reference Interview, and we’re good at that. And that’s comforting in a world that feels pretty chaotic and uncertain.
A week ago the authoritative voices in the U.S. were telling us that face masks weren’t a great idea. The now-famous N95s not only should be saved for the medical professionals and first responders, and they also don’t work well unless they’re properly fitted (all of this, by the way, is still COMPLETELY TRUE). Disposable surgical masks not only should be saved for the medical professionals, first responders, and people who are actively ill, but are also mostly about the wearer not spreading disease rather than about protecting the wearer from getting the disease (all also still true). So the general advice was just to stay away from people rather than wear masks (and staying away from people is, of course, still the best course of action if it’s possible).
Now all of a sudden the CDC says we’re all supposed to wear masks, and I’ve turned nearly every non-working moment toward my new cottage industry of sewing masks for people. (I’ve made 62 so far, mostly over the weekend but also in the couple of hours before work each morning and the couple of hours before bed each night.) I think of the masks I make as a hug that the recipient can throw in the wash!
Of course, being a librarian by trade as well as by temperament, I wanted to choose patterns and fabric based on more than search engine result ranking. What fabrics should I look for? What pattern should I choose? How do you even use one of these effectively?
Sadly, there’s basically no research on homemade face masks for use during an infectious disease outbreak. In fact, there’s one whole study (Chughtai 2013) on how there aren’t studies on this but there should be because what would happen if we ended up in a pandemic and ran out of disposable masks? (Excuse me a minute while I cry into my tea.) Given that, I proceeded to do what all librarians do: look for what does exist from authoritative sources and then triangulate and verify across multiple sources to see if I can figure out a good way forward. Maybe it’s not The way forward, but at least it’s a way that seems best backed by the most authoritative sources I could find.
Fabric
Basically all the requests for cloth masks that come from hospitals say to use densely woven cotton or cotton/polyester blend fabric, like what quilters use, for the two outer layers of a cloth mask. There are studies on cloth masks made from common household cloth that helps me understand why this is true — for example T-shirt material is only 1/3 as effective as a surgical mask, but tea towels are a bit better, and nothing is as good as actual surgical masks (Rengasamy, Eimer, and Shaffer 2010; MacIntyre et al. 2015; Davies et al. 2013). Basically, fabrics are all so different, even if they’re made of similar materials, that scientists just can’t really predict which ones will absolutely be best (Rengasamy, Eimer, and Shaffer 2010; Shakya et al. 2017). The same fabric might even improve over time after multiple washings (Kim 2017), so definitely launder your masks (recommendations include laundering before sewing so that they won’t shrink afterwards, and then laundering after every use because after you’ve worn it it’s probably come in contact with the virus). Then we come to the triangulation part of the research process, and basically lots of different scientists and medical professionals are quoted in lots of different news outlets and sewing instructions from hospitals saying variations on “the tighter the weave the better, but you also have to be able to breathe through it.” So that’s what I’m going with – tight woven fabric, not knitted t-shirt fabric.
Then there’s a common element in hospital requests for a “non-woven” filter material between the outer layers of the mask. Actual surgical masks are made of non-woven material because they don’t have all those tiny holes where the threads overlap — fewer/smaller holes means better protection — and this has been the case for a long time now (Furuhashi 1978). Again, triangulating from interviews with medical professionals in various news outlets, things like vacuum cleaner bags and HEPA are awesome but can get harder to breathe through, those blue shop towels are great, and paper towels are better than nothing. The CDC recommends a coffee filter.
I don’t have non-woven fabric, so that means I’ll need to chose a pattern to make that allows for paper filters to be inserted.
Choosing the pattern
There are SO many patterns out there. If you’re making masks to donate to a healthcare institution, use whatever pattern they ask for. If you’re making masks for places that don’t specify a pattern, here are the common elements I found as I triangulated everything I could read on the subject.
It must fully cover the nose and mouth
It should have two layers of cloth
It must fit as closely to the face as possible (no gaps by your chin, cheeks, or on either side of your nose)
If it doesn’t have a built-in non-woven filter material, it should have a pocket so that wearers can insert filters.
It should be sturdy enough to withstand washing. Lots of washing. People should be washing these masks after every use.
Anything that meets these criteria will be a fine pattern, so if you find one you like, go for it!
I experimented with a bunch of patterns (pleated versions and contoured versions), and for my own work I decided on a pattern that maximized the important coverage and fit requirements while minimizing fabric use. I also experimented making masks with and without a wire over the nose (inserting it is fiddly, and it has to be either removable or washable) and decided that the fit is a whole lot better with the wire. The pattern I chose also seems to work best for people who wear glasses, since it stays away from the eye area better. On the down side, I actually need a pattern to cut around since it’s not just a rectangle, and it takes longer to sew each mask.
A lot of the benefit of these masks probably comes from helping us remember not to touch our faces. If made well, used properly, and laundered after each use, they may also help contain any germs that we breath/cough out, and they might filter out some of the germs around us before they get into our bodies. So I’m going to make masks, and I’m going to wear them, but just as the CDC’s guidelines suggest, I’m not going to think of them as magical virus blockers that make it safe for me to go out and do stuff near other people.
Bibliography
Chughtai, Abrar Ahmad, Holly Seale, and Chandini Raina MacIntyre. 2013. “Use of Cloth Masks in the Practice of Infection Control – Evidence and Policy Gaps.” International Journal of Infection Control 9 (3). https://doi.org/10.3396/IJIC.v9i3.020.13.
Davies, Anna, Katy-Anne Thompson, Karthika Giri, George Kafatos, Jimmy Walker, and Allan Bennett. 2013. “Testing the Efficacy of Homemade Masks: Would They Protect in an Influenza Pandemic?” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness 7 (4): 413–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2013.43.
Furuhashi, M. 1978. “A Study on the Microbial Filtration Efficiency of Surgical Face Masks–with Special Reference to the Non-Woven Fabric Mask.” The Bulletin of Tokyo Medical and Dental University 25 (1): 7–15.
Kim, Seung Won. 2017. “Changes of Particle Filtration Efficiency of Cloth Masks by Machine Washing and Cloth Expansion.” Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene 27 (2): 115–22. https://doi.org/10.15269/JKSOEH.2017.27.2.115.
MacIntyre, C. Raina, Holly Seale, Tham Chi Dung, Nguyen Tran Hien, Phan Thi Nga, Abrar Ahmad Chughtai, Bayzidur Rahman, Dominic E. Dwyer, and Quanyi Wang. 2015. “A Cluster Randomised Trial of Cloth Masks Compared with Medical Masks in Healthcare Workers.” BMJ Open 5 (4): e006577. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577.
Rengasamy, Samy, Benjamin Eimer, and Ronald E. Shaffer. 2010. “Simple Respiratory Protection—Evaluation of the Filtration Performance of Cloth Masks and Common Fabric Materials Against 20–1000 Nm Size Particles.” The Annals of Occupational Hygiene 54 (7): 789–98. https://doi.org/10.1093/annhyg/meq044.
Shakya, Kabindra M, Alyssa Noyes, Randa Kallin, and Richard E Peltier. 2017. “Evaluating the Efficacy of Cloth Facemasks in Reducing Particulate Matter Exposure.” Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology 27 (3): 352–57. https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2016.42.
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.
My living room this morning, complete with knitting chart on the coffee table, and my home laptop.
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.
My kitchen table office, complete with work plants on the table, tea under a tea cozy, and windows.
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.
