Monthly tips, suggestions, and questions to help you make your library welcoming and useful for the widest range of patrons possible.
Consider adding a library-oriented communication board to your tools at the desk for helping staff work with patrons who don’t share a language with them or who have limited verbal abilities. Here’s an example: https://www.boardmakeronline.com/Activity/326912
Do a Google Maps search, or consult your colleagues, to find an organization in your neighborhood that supports a group of people who you think your library could serve better, whether that’s kids with learning disabilities, recent immigrants, or adults with limited or no literacy. Call or email that organization and ask them for suggestions about how the library could make itself more welcoming to their clients, and/or invite them for a personalized tour of the library building.
Many American libraries in areas with large black populations shelve ‘African-American’ titles in their own section, or add some kind of sticker to certain books to make them easier for black patrons to find. If you do this, make sure you’re doing it in a thoughtful way that actually fills a patron need. Books by white authors about black characters are probably not a great choice. Neither is only stickering historical fiction or ‘issue’ books (usually things about slavery/the civil rights movement) and ignoring contemporary black fiction.
Modern electric wheelchairs often require higher clearance than hand-powered chairs or regular office chairs. Make sure you have at least one computer station and one table that someone in an electric wheelchair can pull into. If you don’t have a good way to test this, you might want to use these ADA guidelines as a starting point for minimum heights: https://www.ada.gov/reachingout/servingcustomers.html
When is the last time you used the public bathroom at your library? If it’s so gross that you wait until the staff one is free instead, that’s a problem. It’s not significant for most people, but for those who have to go to the bathroom very often (pregnant women, people with certain gastrointestinal disorders, kids who are young enough that when they have to go, they have to go right that moment), having a bathroom that’s really unpleasant is effectively a barrier to them staying longer than it takes just to pick up a held item and get out. Is there anything you can do to make the bathroom more pleasant, such as propping open the doors for better ventilation, stopping in once a day to wipe off the counters, or just investing in a couple of cans of air freshener?
If you can’t afford a professional translation service, go online to a crowdsourcing site like reddit or metafilter and get a single paragraph of important information about your library translated into a language other than English. Libraries can sometimes be hesitant to put out materials that don’t meet a certain professional standard—worrying that it won’t follow the style guide, will have errors, or won’t be as complete as the English version. However, if the realistic alternative to incomplete information or information with minor grammatical errors is no information at all, do your non-English-speaking patrons the service of giving them the former.
Something you often hear at public library conferences or in articles aimed at public librarians is “Anyone can walk through our doors.” However, that’s not true in a literal sense, especially if your doors are hard to open. If you don’t have an automatic door, look into whether it’s feasible for the library to get one.
Consider becoming a demo site for your state, province, or national government’s library for the blind. You may not be in a position to buy and circulate Braille materials, an extensive audio collection, etc., but you are almost certainly in the position to point patrons to the people who can. U.S. library workers can start at: https://www.loc.gov/nls/
If your children’s section has a separate collection of books about holidays, take a look at how that collection is organized. Many libraries organize that section around the Gregorian calendar year, which is a problem for holidays like Ramadan which move throughout that year because they are based on a lunar or lunisolar calendar. Consider changing the way that you organize holiday books so that non-Christian holidays have a sensible place and are easier to find.
When it’s your turn to shovel the library sidewalk, shovel the ramp, then the stairs. Not the other way around.
Many libraries have sections in their codes of conduct that prohibit the use of profanity or ‘offensive language.’ If your library is one of them, think carefully about which terms you prioritize when you enforce it. “Gay” and “retarded” aren’t often considered curse words, but when used as insults, they are just as likely to make patrons who overhear them feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. On the flip side, if your library is located in a community where certain curse words are a common feature of speech for most people (or even a certain demographic), you might want to reconsider the wisdom of kicking people out for talking the way they normally talk.
There’s been a movement to replace the current ISO “disabled” icon with one that is more active looking. Read about it here, and consider updating the signage in your library and its parking lot: http://accessibleicon.org/
Spend a little time thinking about how your library can serve people who aren’t physically capable of visiting the library. Can you start or expand a books by mail service? Can you allow people to sign up for cards online, perhaps by submitting a scan of a photo ID, and use those cards to access your digital collection? Can you take a box of books and a laptop to a nearby senior center and do card signup and checkout on the spot? If it’s not feasible to circulate library materials this way but you do receive donated items that you don’t always add to the collection, set some of the nicer ones aside and give them to a local apartment complex, assisted living facility, or other location to start or restock a community collection.
The next time you do a fire drill (and if you can’t remember the last time your library did one, you are due), check to make sure your alarms have working flashing lights so that Deaf as well as hearing people will be alerted to the emergency. If your alarms are auditory only, ask your facilities team to see if the library can replace them with ones with a visual component.
Are your non-English materials labelled “foreign languages”? Consider re-labeling them as almost literally anything else. Spanish-speakers, Korean-speakers, etc. living in the United States are not foreign.
Imagine an adult patron who is in the process of learning to read and wants to practice with library materials. Do you have books that are appropriate for their reading level but also for their age? How hard are these books to find? If it’s not reasonable to pull them out into a separate section, can you create a list of suggested titles that staff can help patrons find and borrow? In addition, assess not just the discoverability and size of materials for new adult readers, but also their quality. Do they contain compelling facts or interesting information that will make someone feel rewarded for reading, or are they dated, simplified versions of ‘classic’ literature that are unlikely to resonate with a new reader?
Do you have a coworker who is really good at working with a group of people you struggle to serve well? We probably all have that colleague who is amazing with gestures and who everyone calls on to help the Spanish-speaking patron when none of the Spanish-speaking staff is in, or the children’s librarian who can get kids on the autism spectrum to tell her what they need when the rest of us can’t even get them to look in our direction. Spend a while watching that person and see if you can figure out what they do well and copy it, or, even better, tell them that you’ve noticed that they are great at x and see if they can share any tips or techniques with you.
There is a pretty good chance that your library card policy includes a rule that the person taking responsibility for a card has to be the age of majority. If this is the case, make a plan for what you are going to do if a teen parent brings her (or his) young child into the library. Don’t wait until they are standing in front of you to figure out who you can sign up for a card in that situation.
Search through the tools and technology gathering dust in a back room or closet. Is there any assistive technology moldering back there when it belongs out on the public floor, getting used?
Do you have a large print keyboard, and/or one with a Braille overlay? If not, can you afford to purchase one, or at least to purchase stickers to put over the keys of an existing keyboard? Even stickers (or replacement keys) with regular-sized type can be helpful to improve a worn keyboard. This is especially true if you serve a lot of older patrons, who are more likely to be in the early stages of learning to use a keyboard and thus can’t infer that what looks like a “C” in the top row is actually a worn-away “O.”