Humans of St. Norbert:

“It’s an exciting roller coaster time to work in libraries and what SNC found, in particular, was that digital information was very valuable, but space for the intellectual community was also very important. We juggle both of those things all the time. When we pivoted in the spring, the agony was that we were no longer able to actually offer the physical space, the intellectual community space. That was a piece that people were going to and did miss. We’ve been straddling the digital world for a long time and we were fortunate that we already had a lot of comfort doing virtual conversations, checking in with students via chat about what they needed, delivering information and pushing it out in PDF form. So pieces like that didn’t get interrupted, but they did get hit harder.

I love the things that we’ve been able to learn during the pandemic and know that we will just incorporate those things and have them be a part of our new normal going forward. I enjoy the roller coaster nature of being in a library. In reality it’s a high-tech world that is also deeply committed to excellent customer service and so it’s sort of just an adventure. It’s fun!

“It’s really important to me that our SNC students understand that information is a commodity that is bought and sold all the time. As a commodity, it’s something that can have high quality or low quality so we want students to really be able to go out thinking critically about information, about where it came from and how reliable it is. We know that that is a very big deal nationally. It always is whether one is having to deal with a cancer diagnosis and needing to look up information about treatment options, or whether it has to do with government policies and approaches.” – Kristin Vogel, director of the Mulva Library