Guille-Alles Library staff keen to keep things clean

Groups and businesses are being encouraged to work together as teams, to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses on the community.

When the library had to close its doors during lockdown it moved as much of its service that it could online, with reading groups and children’s activities taking place via Zoom and Facebook Live.

Prior to lockdown it had offered a limited home delivery service, which was expanded with great success when people were not able to visit.

Library senior management team member Adam Bayfield said this had proved to be really popular.

‘Our staff were delivering books, DVDs and jigsaws, mostly to our older, more vulnerable library users, who were shielding, something we have decided to continue to do,’ he said

The team also continue to deliver to those in the community who need to self-isolate.

The library was able to re-open in Phase 4 but the team had to adapt how they operated to adhere to strict guidelines at the time.

‘There were plenty of challenges,’ said Mr Bayfield.

‘We had a one-way system around the library to help with social distancing, we encouraged only one person per household to come in and also moved our self-service kiosks around to avoid people congregating closely together.

‘It’s easy to forget now that we were only in that phase for two or three weeks, then we were essentially back to normal, just following the increased hygiene guidelines.’

The library is making a conscious decision to stock up on hand sanitiser and cleaning products.

It has fixed hand sanitiser stations on all the floors and individual bottled sanitiser dotted throughout all the rooms on all the floors.

‘Our staff regularly clean the self-service kiosks, PCs and all the major touch points around the building,’ said Mr Bayfield.

‘We are really lucky to have such an enthusiastic team who work so diligently.’