Francestown’s George Holmes Bixby Memorial Library has begun curbside service and brought on Peterborough resident Chloe Kipka as the new children’s librarian. Tuesday marked the first day with three staff members on the job since the start of the COVID-19 shutdowns, director Laura Abrahamsen said. “I was sort of alone making decisions,” she said, after the assistant librarian was furloughed and the former children’s librarian decided to move back to Virginia. It was up to her to decide what level of service was safe and feasible to provide alone, and to hire a new staff member.
Kipka was literally hired sight unseen, Abrahamsen said, since her camera wasn’t working during the interview. “It was very clear in the process that Chloe belonged here,” Abrahamsen said. Kipka, 25, is a ConVal graduate and, as she quipped in her interview, “still pretty close to being a kid” herself, Abrahamsen said. Kipka started last week. “I’m really excited to be here,” she said, and wants to do her best to provide the community with what they want. She has only ever been a library patron before, but has a background working with children. Kipka worked with the Harrisville Children’s Center previously, and taught German to middle and high school students after attending Emory University in Georgia, she said. When asked about her favorite children’s author or book, Kipka said she couldn’t choose, she has hundreds of favorites.
Abrahamsen said she got a decent number of applications for the position, which was posted as 22 hours a week, but didn’t get the sense that any applicants had been laid off from another job due to the pandemic.
Kipka’s first task is to set up the library’s summer reading program in a way that doesn’t involve in-building services at all. She’s also attempting to balance virtual programming with other routes due to some residents’ lack of internet.
“Our patrons like the physical items,” Abrahamsen said, “people want books they can hold in their hands.” Earlier in the library’s closure Abrahamsen substantially increased the library’s e-book circulation but it only attracted five additional patrons to the service, she said, but library patrons still have first dibs on some of the bestsellers through the library’s own copy of New Hampshire Downloadable Books, she said.
Abrahamsen said she devised the no-touch curbside service to provide for Francestown patrons’ needs while taking appropriate precautions to protect everyone’s health. “We’re all building the plane as we fly it,” she said of librarians across the state, and the Francestown library will be quarantining returned books and misting them with a bleach solution before reshelving them. She’s still working out the next phase of the reopening plan, however. “Every library director I know is worried about the whole browsing [situation],” she said, and what to do if a patron reads the jacket on 15 new books and only checks one out.