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Category: Services
Stepping into 2021
Many are stepping into 2021 with a mixture of hope and apprehension as 2020 goes down in our memories as a year full of inconsistencies, unrest, anxiety, loneliness, and a pandemic. Most eyes show the effects when the topic of the past year comes up in conversation and most mouths have stories of how 2020 has adversely affected them. My hopes and prayers are that we will never look back on 2020 fondly!
We at Lincoln Library have all had our own personal struggles this past year. The library itself has also had some setbacks and did a bit of stumbling around in the dark as we tried to find a balance in between keeping the door open, but yet keeping our patrons safe. We have had to make lots of changes and, unfortunately, most of them have shortchanged our younger patrons. We have cut computer privileges, games, and other activities that involves larger groups of children gathering due to the difficulty of sanitizing and maintaining social distancing amongst that age group.
We are open our normal hours and you do not have to have an appointment to come in. We send faxes; the cost is 50 cents per page to send a fax and 10 cents a page to receive a fax. We make copies; we charge 10 cents for black and white and no more than 75 cents for a copy in color. We do have computers available for public use for adults only. Children may use the computers if they are doing school work.
We have books, lots of books! If we don’t have what you are wanting to read, we can usually get it for you through Interlibrary Loan. We have a good selection of movies; we can also order movies through Interlibrary Loan. You are more than welcome to come in and read the newspapers and magazines in the reading room. You can also check out the magazines to take home to read.
We also accept donations of magazines, movies, books, after-school snacks, and prizes for bingo. We will be having a book sale this spring as a fundraiser for our expansion project! It will be an excellent way for individuals to build their own personal library!
We want Lincoln Library to be a place to go to get away from it all! It is clean, warm, and you will be welcomed!
Book Sanitizer Machine
We keep busy here at Lincoln Library! Of course, the most important aspect of our days is doing our best to take care of our patrons, but there are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes! Keeping the building clean, tidy, and inviting are daily tasks. Program preparation takes up many hours, as well as our Interlibrary Loan service. Shelving books, magazines, and movies can be quite time consuming, as it is easy to lose one’s focus and end up straightening and correcting the alphabetizing on an entire section. Of course, there is the ordering and finances and everything else that it takes to keep a place up and running. Covid-19 added to it! Not only were there extra cleaning responsibilities, disinfecting, and sanitizing, we began quarantining our books.
We used the large tables in our meeting room to clean and store our quarantined books for a week before returning them to the shelves. The process was inconvenient in many ways: the room was no longer available for meetings, new books were out of circulation, and we could really feel the crunch on our time.
We were approached about applying for money from the Barber County Cares Act. After thoughts were thrown around, our Board’s President, Mellissa Mixon, suggested a book sanitizer. We went with it, they went with it, and we ordered it. The Library Book Sanitizer Machine sanitizes up to 6 books at a time in 30 seconds with UV-C light and high air pressure. Not a cheap alternative to antibacterial wipes and quarantining, but a good one. We so appreciate the $4,300.00 from the Barber County Cares Act and so appreciate this machine. As I emailed back and forth with an employee of PIKinc., he informed me that as of right now, we are the only ones in the State of Kansas with one of these machines.
Books are now being returned quickly to the shelves. Our meeting room is open for meetings and our new books can circulate much quicker to waiting patrons. We like our machine so much that we are searching for the perfect name for her. Things this important cannot be rushed! Our thanks go out to everyone who made this purchase possible. After nine months of cleaning and quarantining books, we appreciate this machine every single day.