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When all spring classes moved online, library staff and faculty quickly jumped into action to support faculty and Â鶹´«Ã½s transitioning to a new way of learning. Despite constantly shifting circumstances, library staff and faculty adapted our services to ensure the community had the resources needed to support WMU’s educational mission.

We shifted to fully remote services and continued to keep resources available 24/7 online. We enhanced our mail and electronic delivery services. Library staff reviewed print course reserves and reached out to faculty to proactively place materials online. Individual Â鶹´«Ã½ requests for course materials were shared broadly with entire classes electronically– saving other Â鶹´«Ã½s from having to make the same request. Crisis-driven exceptions to copyright laws allowed us to increase limits on the amount of physical material than can be digitized and placed online, and a greater number of materials were shared with faculty and Â鶹´«Ã½s as electronic reserves.

Online chat, phone, email, and video conferencing services became our primary means of communicating with and supporting our users. The use of these services has more than doubled over the past month. Librarians continue to support information literacy by becoming embedded in online courses and developing online tutorials. We have made it our top priority to acquire and process requests electronic materials; ebooks, streaming video, and other electronic content are made available within hours of an instructor’s request.

Four staff members—Julie Hayward, Cherise Smith, Jacob Ewing, and Eric Bowler—continue to work onsite under social-distancing protocols to provide access to physical reserves and books. Demands for these materials have increased. In one month, we have fulfilled over 1,200 requests from instructors and Â鶹´«Ã½s for e-reserves, interlibrary loan, and document delivery. We have delivered over 130 items by mail. In addition, electronic resources use has increased 46% since classes transitioned to online.

Posted By: Sara Volmering