Exploring Innovative Strategies and Services in a Pandemic Era

The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented crisis for academic libraries. In March 2020, libraries were confronted with the immediate challenge of maintaining access for their users while moving to a fully remote environment. As classes migrated rapidly online, libraries were slower to close.¹ A monthlong spiral of reducing services and hours ended for most in a complete closure of the physical facilities. By March 29, most academic libraries had shut their doors.² Librarians had to reenvision how they would provide specialized services, instruction, research support, and collections in the remote environment.

As 2020 progressed, collective trauma continued. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, triggered demonstrations against police violence and racism across the United States. At the same time, protests erupted worldwide against racial inequities and economic hardships due to the pandemic. The world would never be the same, and many people got their first extended exposure to ongoing and multilayered hardship and global crisis. These events required academic libraries to do a hard reset. They had to reconsider once set-in-stone processes and procedures because it simply was no longer possible to do things the way they had always been done. Responses to the pandemic and antiracism reshaped many library practices by fall 2020. Remote and on-site work, online learning, electronic collections, and more became different in the aftermath. The culture of physically working together in an academic library radically shifted. No longer colocated, academic library faculty and staff invented new ways of gathering remotely, building community, and caring for one another. An even more urgent and always necessary focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in our organizations confronted and profoundly changed institutional positions and past practices.

In summer 2020, portal Editor Marianne Ryan suggested developing a special issue centered on these current crises—the pandemic, racial inequities, and economic challenges—engulfing our world. These upheavals offered librarians a chance to question their traditional practices and perspectives and adapt to what was possible—and what worked in the moment—within individual institutions and the profession. With that in mind, this issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy explores and accentuates positive possibilities—the unique opportunities, creative strategies, and innovative responses—that emerged in academic libraries because of or in spite of these challenges. This double special issue is the sixth in portal’s 20-year history.

Our fall 2020 call for proposals yielded a landslide of unique and thoughtful abstracts—nearly 80 submissions from academic librarians at a wide range of institutions, including large universities, private colleges, and community colleges across the United States. Novice authors, as well as those sharing diverse perspectives, were encouraged to suggest ideas. From these proposals, we began to see themes emerge around teaching and learning, inventive access to collections, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives. The articles featured in this special issue encapsulate areas of focused innovation that developed throughout academic libraries in the United States. Every article acknowledges the existence of twin pandemics—COVID-19 and the plague of racial violence and social inequity. These combined crises mandated a thoughtful focus on how our institutions could continue to teach and provide resources to our core populations while increasing efforts to offer equitable access and a culture of compassionate care.

Inventive Provision of Services]

New services emerged as a result of pandemic-specific needs. In “Bridging the Digital Divide: WiFi Hot Spots as a Means of Digital Equity,” Meghan Salsbury and Mary Anne Hansen detail the development of a project to provide wireless access to their rural students. Confronting the digital divide inherent in sparsely populated Montana, the authors obtained a grant to purchase and lend wireless hot spots to students and faculty members as long-term circulating items. The article shares a theme that recurred through many in our issue: libraries and librarians understanding and meeting critical basic needs on campus. Similarly, Sarah Fancher and Sarah Mabee confronted an emerging challenge for their students at Ozarks Technical Community College in Missouri. They realized that students would benefit from facilitated access to resources on specific...