27.1 Closed for business

Closure of public and high-traffic facilities would be one measure that authorities might demand. The implications of an indefinite shutdown for libraries and their staffs could be severe. Total closure would require libraries to lock their doors and to cancel services at library sites until further notice. Staff members—including senior managers—would not be permitted to remain at or visit their workplaces without the permission of local police and public health officials.

For some public libraries, there might be security risks during prolonged closures. Serious vandalism, break-ins, and burglaries could become more frequent in some communities. With staff members away from their sites and limited inspections of library facilities, problems would arise from the neglect of basic maintenance and sanitation. If a pipe bursts in the basement, nobody would discover the flood for weeks. If the sprinkler system malfunctioned on the third stack level, thousands of books might be drenched. Many of them might have dried out by the time we returned to our jobs.

Meanwhile, our facilities could become dirty. With the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems working at minimal rates, or ceasing to work altogether, the dust would settle on thousands of shelves and millions of books. There would be no maintenance workers to dust and vacuum collection areas. The filth on library windows from a mixture of condensation and dust would block out daylight and darken our work areas. A musty smell could pervade the building; eventually every curtain and rug would need cleaning.

But some library inhabitants would run free. Rats and mice could invade the staff room and the children’s section. Silverfish would move from the basement and washrooms into the stacks and the Technical Services Department. A pigeon could fly in through a broken window on the ground floor and leave its mark of disrespect on a former mayor’s bronze bust in the foyer.

27.2 Parking lot returns

Taps drip. Food left in the staffroom refrigerator rots. Mail piles up. Since the civil authorities have ordered the library to lock its book drop, frustrated patrons shove dozens of books and other items through the mail slot; others are left in little piles by the front door. Some of the latter disappear forever. Months later, after the pandemic has subsided and the library has reopened, a regular patron returns a box of books that she discovered in the parking lot. Apparently the borrower who left them there didn’t want to be late in returning them, but was too nervous to approach the front door of a public institution during the pandemic.

Does this scenario sound far-fetched? When you consider the effects of even short-term neglect of a building, it’s not. Librarians have seen such things after a long weekend or a Christmas break; what they would see in a library that has been closed for several months could be much worse.

Layoffs would occur in many libraries. These could be prolonged and financially inconvenient for most staff members. Still, with daily broadcasts concerning fatalities and the continuing spread of the disease, few staff members would want to risk a shift at the circulation counter or reference desk. Librarians might want to continue some services electronically. For example, limited readers’ advisory and reference services could be available through websites and e-mail. Telephone service could continue in some communities. The success of such operational continuity would depend on the sophistication of a library’s electronic resources, and on the librarians’ ability to work with restricted access to physical collections at their library sites.

27.3 Clean teams

Libraries might also consider the activation of “clean teams” to continue library operations. The origin of such teams is centuries old. In Boccaccio’s Decameron, written between 1350 and 1353, we find the notion of isolating a select group of people so that they can survive and keep busy during an outbreak of bubonic plague. As long as all members of the group are free of infection, they can work and play together safely. In modern instances such as the Toronto outbreak of SARS in 2003, clean teams from various organizations holed up in Ontario’s cottage country and continued working with laptops.

With wireless technology, clean team operations are even easier to organize and maintain. Team members can perform many if not all of their usual duties on BlackBerries and other handheld devices. Of course, the wireless “solution” is not appropriate for some public library activities. It would be impracticable to offer a children’s interactive Storytime through a network of BlackBerries, and programs involving puppets are out of the question. But librarians could adapt various technical service processes for temporary wireless continuation, and library administrators could meet and make decisions as easily through a wireless system as they do through conference calling. The advantage of wireless communications is that they allow clean teams to function without team members’ traveling to meet each other. When team members don’t meet, the risk of infection decreases even further.

Currently, to control the spread of disease, public health officials urge us to wash our hands often. They assume that we touch our faces frequently, particularly our noses, eyes, and lips, and thus infect ourselves with colds and influenza. To wash our hands with soap and hot water is one way to stay healthy. But such measures are less effective if the disease is spread through airborne transmission, a possibility that deeply concerns the medical community. If a careless sneeze can lead to the transmission of deadly influenza, hand washing alone will not stop the spread of the disease. Even with an aggressive national immunization program, we might be faced with high morbidity, especially in crowded urban areas.

27.4 Maintaining health

The most basic way of protecting oneself is to maintain good general health. This sounds obvious, but consider how easy—and comfortable—it is to maintain bad habits such as smoking, excessive eating, and avoidance of exercise. Doctors believe that we can prevent much illness through simple, regular exercise such as walking and swimming. More advanced exercise programs involving aerobics and yoga can stimulate our immune systems even more. Along with a sensible diet and a reduction of stress, exercise can protect us from many different forms of disease, including pandemic influenza.

Many libraries urge staff members to get a flu shot every year. This measure can be effective against the influenza outbreaks that occur during flu season, but it will not necessarily protect us from a form of flu that has mutated from the avian variety. In a pandemic, we would be forced to fall back on emergency response measures such as closure of public institutions and distribution of available anti-influenza treatments. Travel, even between local neighborhoods, could be discouraged or even restricted for a temporary period.

Fortunately, pandemics abate in time, and even the most virulent strain of influenza is unlikely to wreak havoc for more than a few months. There’s something else that we should all remember about popular panics. They don’t always lead to actual disasters. We tend to forget those terrible possibilities that never became reality, such as the spread of Killer Bees.

And with any luck, some day you can file this article with your unused Y2K emergency plan, and return to your Boccaccio.