Welcome back to the East Lothian Libraries blog!

 

Hello! - We know it’s been a while. We’ve had a lot of big changes within the service, oh, and a global pandemic to deal with! All twelve of our branches closed in March 2020 for an undetermined length of time and it meant that many of our staff were redeployed to help out in other council areas. Several of us were asked to help call those that had been asked to shield by the government. We were tasked with making sure these people were accessing all of the help and support they needed and sometimes we were just being someone to talk to each week. It was an incredibly rewarding role and we are very proud of our team for being there for our most vulnerable people.

 

Over the past year, we have said goodbye to several staff members who are now enjoying retirement, although they left without the send-off that we would have liked! We’ve also welcomed some new members to the library family with a couple of babies being born during these bizarre times. We’re still to meet them properly but can’t wait until we can all get together again!

 

We began reopening branches in August. Starting with the four main libraries of Dunbar, Haddington, Musselburgh and North Berwick we allowed a limited number of people in to choose their books. Due to new guidelines, we would schedule them a 30 minute visit and although it was a very different way of working, it was nice to have our readers back! Over time, we had started to reopen more of our branches.

 

After Christmas we had to reduce our service again. With the new lockdown brought into force, we could no longer allow people in to the buildings. Once again we had to adjust to a new way of working. Adapting to new guidelines may have meant closing some libraries again but we are proud that we could still offer click and collect from four of our branches and maintain the home delivery service. Click and collect has proven to be very popular with our readers. They have the option of choosing particular books or we can choose something that we think they will enjoy. Many readers have commented that they’ve discovered new authors via this service and are just happy that we are able to offer something during this lockdown.

library volunteer delivering books -
wearing a mask to keep our customers safe. 

As we move forward through this year there will no doubt be more changes to come. We do hope we can start welcoming people back into our buildings soon, we really are looking forward to seeing our customers again. We will keep you updated via all the usual channels: Twitter, Facebook, Webpages and here on the blog!

 

We plan to post  here more regularly. We’ll bring you news from the libraries, any changes that we might have to make in the coming months and perhaps some entertainment along the way!