Safety Precautions at the SU Libraries

Like the rest of the Salisbury University staff, we spent a good bit of the summer planning how to make our part of campus as safe as possible for our students and staff. Here are some of the ways we have tried to do that:

• The Libraries are open only to SU ID holders. We installed sneeze guards at all of our public desks and put signage EVERYWHERE reminding people to keep their masks on and social distance.
• The Facilities staff removed many chairs to help enforce social distancing, and the IT staff removed mice and keyboards from many computers for the same purpose. The removed chairs are stacked in one of our reading rooms.
• We revamped our checkout process, establishing a self-checkout station so that users can check out materials for themselves without the need for staff to handle their materials. We are not checking out some smaller items, such as headphones, that are hard to clean. And we established a curbside pickup program for those people who are not comfortable coming into the Guerrieri Academic Commons as well as a paging program to retrieve items for people who are comfortable only dashing into and out of the building.
• For returned items, we have established a quarantine process. We turned a vacant staff office into a quarantine room and isolate items for a set number of days. We are following guidelines established by a national library partnership as to the length of quarantine, which varies by material.
• The MakerLab remains open, but only by appointment, to ensure that it does not get too crowded. We have simplified the process for requesting prints from our 3D printers, so that the requester does not have to be present but can submit their requests virtually. And users can meet with our staff via Zoom rather than in person.
• The Nabb Center has made numerous changes in adapting to operating during the pandemic. Unfortunately, because the GAC is open only to SU ID holders at this time, members of the general public cannot visit, except in unusual circumstances. But the Nabb Center is open by appointment for SU users and can take up to eight users at a time, to ensure social distancing. It still hosts class visits, but instruction is via Zoom and instead of getting to use original manuscripts and artifacts, users get digital versions. The Nabb Center’s exhibits remain open, but there also are digital versions for those who are unable to come to the GAC. And the staff is answering a lot of research inquiries.
• The Curriculum Research Center (CRC) in Conway Hall, a branch of the SU Libraries, is open for users. Like the main library, it has sneeze guards in place. Sadly, the puppet collection, normally one of the highlights of the CRC, has been put away for the duration, given the impossibility of cleaning the puppets.

You can rest assured we are doing best to keep our users and staff safe!