[Libs-Or] Library Home Delivery

[Adam Carlson]

Hello Library Colleagues,

I wanted to share with you all that for the last three weeks McMinnville Public Library has been doing a home delivery service for our library patrons. This is different than curbside pickup. We are delivering directly to people's homes within the city limits of McMinnville. It is an opt-in service only and we are adhering to strict safety measures of social distancing, protective equipment, sanitizing materials, and quarantining materials.

This was not a decision we came to lightly. The safety of our patrons is of utmost importance to us. However, we also recognize this is a very stressful time in people's lives and people are struggling. In addition to physical health, people's economic, social, emotional, mental, and spiritual lives have been upended.  Our patrons quality of life is also important to us. As you probably already know research indicates depression, suicide, and domestic abuse are all on the rise. In an effort to mitigate the negative effects of social isolation and to encourage our patrons to stay home and stay healthy we decided to implement this program.

Since starting this program 412 people in our town of 35,000 have signed up. We have circulated 1,705 items through the program thus far. There has been a tremendous level of support and goodwill our patrons have had for this program. And staff have been happy to be seeing familiar faces (even if with a mask on). While we have been keeping busy with other projects, it has been very nice to see public resources getting off our empty library shelves and into the hands of the public we serve. We've even been able to sign a few new library patron's up for their first library card!

Several other public libraries within our library system have expressed interest in implementing a version of this program in their own cities. So we wanted to share this with the larger library community. If you have questions about this program please feel free to contact me directly about it. You can also find more information about it on our website<https://www.mcminnvilleoregon.gov/library/page/home-delivery>.

Thank you to all of you out there doing amazing things to serve your community.

Adam Carlson
Circulation Supervisor
McMinnville Public Library
(503) 435-5556

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://omls.oregon.gov/pipermail/libs-or/attachments/20200422/5cddc1c3/attachment.html>