Poet Maggie Smith recently posted this on her Instagram account, “A wise person once told me to start each day by asking myself the same question: ‘What else is possible?’
There it is–an opening when things may feel like they’re narrowing or even closing.
What else is possible?”
The global community has been experiencing a constriction of what it means to live one’s life over the past year. Yet, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention begin to loosen guidelines for fully vaccinated individuals, it feels as though this spring has the capacity to truly ignite a sense of rebirth.
The library has historically fueled its mission with the idea of “what else is possible?” Our staff consistently has innovation and creativity at the forefront of what we aim to do. What else can we offer to expand the lives of our community? What services may be helpful? Who are we reaching? And, who are we not?
While our doors were physically closed for much of 2020, our work continued as we explored new avenues to provide a wide range of services to the public. There was a 75% surge of e-book usage over the summer months, and our Overdrive collection size increased from 18,000 to 24,000 titles, with an additional 500,000+ simultaneous access titles available with our subscription to Hoopla. We worked with vendors to enable remote access to Ancestry.com, JSTOR, and the Wall Street Journal. We launched new services to provide specific readers advisory and curriculum recommendations. We increased public WiFi access to cover all of Hinds Plaza, and launched the lending of WiFi hotspots. English conversation classes were moved online. Our staff worked from home at their virtual information desks, answering questions from the public. We made individual phone calls to some of our community members to check in and see how they were faring. Our youth services team took story time online. Between March and November, the library hosted 462 virtual programs, with a total attendance of 20,525. There’s more, but if you know us, you already know that.
What is possible? At the Princeton Public Library, we believe the sky’s the limit.