By Brian Freitag
TASPL Director
School is out for summer, and the area is once again abuzz with ambitious youth prowling the neighborhoods for yard maintenance chores to take-on for profit.
Outside working on the yard, I often see the tiny faces of my cats peering down from the upper windows of my home with extreme interest, agonizing and chittering over all the potential with squirrels, birds, chipmunks, and skunks—yes, plural—although they frequent more north and south of our home regularly crossing the street.
My wife and I take evasive action while walking the dogs, watching the little black and white marauders from a safe distance while they pridefully amble past and dig here and there in pursuit of things appealing to skunks.
As construction progresses within Tahquamenon Area Schools, school and library staff alike end up taking evasive action; navigating the blocked-off areas of work in progress (as opposed to skunks or other critters) on the way to their destinations. When you have obstacles to overcome, you improvise, adapt, and overcome, eventually getting past the obstacle when things normalize.
The library is definitely in adapt-and-improvise mode with our library services. Patrons cannot currently browse for new reads within TASPL’s collection, so we improvised: We have a holds-only service for books placed on hold from our cooperative libraries (via TASPL’s webpage https://tahq.bibliocommons.com) by patrons being delivered curbside to patrons by appointment.
Our hours for library holds-only service are Monday, Tuesday, and Friday from 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. and Wednesday and Thursday from 11 a.m. – 7 p.m. Call us during those hours at (906) 293-5214 to make an appointment for curbside pick-up of items you placed on hold.
Given everything library is packed and stored within TAS temporarily; we offer our library without walls with digital services of Hoopla at https://www.hoopladigital.com and Overdrive at https://www.overdrive.com so patrons can access movies, eBooks, audiobooks, magazines, music and television with their library cards.
Another digital service our patrons can access is the Michigan Electronic Library with databases and resources to access for youth and adults with your library card at https://www.mel.org.
Since we can’t offer storytime inside our library walls, we have “Storytime in the wild” for children outside Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. starting today, June 19. Please reference TASPL’s Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/tahquamenonlibrary/ for more details.
So, there’s no reason the summer of construction must be a summer bummer and a “book fast”. Take advantage of our services and keep reading.
