Wow. It's been sort of quiet over here. My library had been busy, busy getting caught back up after summer. And then we hired a new employee and needed to get him trained up. Finally, we got the hang out everything and bam: COVID-19. On one hand, this has been a pretty hard experience. Everyone goes into librarianship for different reasons, but I think for a lot of us, one of the reasons is a desire to help out community in the best way that we can. I'm good with computers. I read a lot and like to talk books when I'm asked. I'm a patient teacher. ERGO: Libraries. But with us closed to the public, I was feeling a little lost. How do I help people when they're not in front of me? Here's where the other hand comes in. A coworker and I have been discussing digital programming for a while now, but we had concerns - how would it work, what would our numbers count towards, would our patrons even be in to something like this? I decided to take this time to find out the answers to our concerns - what better time to test digital programming than when our community doesn't have any other option? The minute I got the green light, I hit the ground running. I created a programming calendar for the library, I started creating facebook events, you name it. I'm working from home, so the programming I can offer has been limited to whatever I can make work, but so far whatever I can make work has been pretty successful. And knowing that the majority of our patrons are trapped at home, I wanted to create programming that used items that they would probably have at their own homes. The first week, I taught a "Crayola Calligraphy" course that had fifteen people watching on Facebook live! That may seem small, but for adult programming for us, that's huge! And it was just me teaching some very, very basic calligraphy using a fat crayola marker and some printer paper. I also led a watercolor paint-along class the same week, also on Facebook Live. I feel like adults especially don't take the time to just sit down and paint - part of it's a timing thing, and I think part of it is just an unfortunate side effect of growing up. We don't want to make mistakes. We don't want to get our hands dirty. We don't want to make something that may not be pretty. Everything is new to children, so it's all fun, even if something doesn't turn out quite right. So I marketed it as something that adults could do with their kids watercolor sets. I let them know that no sketching was involved. We were just throwing colors on some card stock and drawing some trees. And it turned out great! I had people message us afterwards, telling us it was exactly what they needed right now. It was a really validating feeling, knowing that I could still help our patrons even if I couldn't be hands on with them the way that I normally can. Here are the links to the two videos: Crayola Calligraphy Watercolor Paint-Along
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