Greenwich Free Library
Special Staying Home Edition
Differently Open
The wonderful books, with their weight and smells and satisfying page-turning, are resting quietly on the shelves – along with the Music and book CDs and the movie DVDs – but the Greenwich Free Library website is growing every day as we add resources, reliable information and new ways to access them. Our Facebook pages are bursting with updated health news, activities for families and fun posts to take your mind off your troubles. Our open WiFi is on 24/7. You can sit (alone) on our back porch or bring your new mobile office (car) to our parking lot any time you need to connect.
If you haven’t been to our Website lately, take a moment to look it over.
- Go to our new menu category, Digital Library, if you need a card or can’t remember your card number.
- Digital Library is also where you’ll find a growing list of links to many newly available online resources.
- The Home page is where you’ll find ebooks /audiobooks and databases. If you haven't used ebooks before, here's a tutorial on using the Libby ap. We have redirected resources to add titles to those collections in the last few weeks.
- We are currently in the process of getting Kanopy, a streaming movie service, that will allow our cardholders to watch without joining a subscription service. So check back.
We’ve had questions about why we closed and why we aren’t lending any physical books and movies. Shutting the doors and knowing that there are plenty of our friends and neighbors who can’t get online has been heartbreaking for us. There are people we see – and love to see – every week or every day. We miss talking with them about books and everything else. We are glad to be there for people who pop in for a fax, to get a document notarized or because their printer broke down. Our fish would much rather have excited children feeding them every day. We recently added to our public meeting spaces because we know how important they are to community groups and individuals. Our own programs had waiting lists. The library is a basic element of community infrastructure that fills many needs for people of all ages.
Serving our community is the basis of our mission and the best way to do that right now is to shut down a potential point of transmission. And until we get a definitive answer about how long the virus lives on books, we can’t in good conscience circulate them throughout the community. We are monitoring the situation and will leap on any good solution to this problem as soon as we find it. In the meantime, we hope that the folks who can’t get online have a stack of “books I’ll get to someday” to finally get to.
A big Thank You to everyone for heeding our request to keep your library books and donations at home. We have no way to handle and process things right now and don't want to expose our staff to any virus that may be lingering on them.
We do have one request. Please check in with your neighbors - even if you aren’t friends. One of the important functions of the library is social. After a week in the house, a lot of people are feeling the lack of connection. A phone call or a socially-distanced conversation can really brighten someone’s day.
We can't wait to see you again and hope that, in the meantime, you find the resources we have developed to be useful. Remember to check back on our website regularly because, like everything else these days, it's changing all the time.
Please email me if you have questions or concerns amiller@sals.edu
-Annie