![]() We’ll have a butterfly house that someone is making for us.”Īn open house to mark Marshall’s retirement will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. “This year, it’s going to be a bee and butterfly garden because bees are under such attack in this world and without bees, this planet just cannot last,” she said. ![]() Last year, they started a vegetable garden, but really didn’t get enough produce to give away. So we decided if they can do that, maybe we can do that, too, to kind of show them we’re at the same place that you are and we’re trying to help. “Somebody was growing corn on their porch, which I thought was so amazing. “On Waldo Street, they had all these gardens on their porches,” she said. To better connect with the community, the library started a garden project last year. “Storytime was something we worked really hard to build up, and it was going so well before the pandemic.” Marshall said storytime was her favorite day of the week. Some we returned and some they said we could keep.” Women in town used to collect tea cups and things, and they just donated their tea cups. “That was phenomenal because we had families coming in, had dads coming in,” Marshall said. She said they also had an Alice in Wonderland tea party to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the movie. We had a few men, which was nice, actually.” They were incredible, with all the women coming in. “We had a photo booth with all the old jewelry and the fascinators for the hair. “It was starting to go out and we knew that people would really miss that, so we threw a tea party, like the old English tea parties,” Marshall said. Perhaps the library’s most popular event was the Downton Abbey tea party when the very popular British historical drama was broadcast on PBS for six seasons from 2010 to 2015. Marshall said they lost their IT person, Tom Currivan, and haven’t found a successor. They are Abbey Austin, circulation supervisor Mary Ann Fournier, reference librarian, adult librarian and teenage librarian Serena Theriault, library aide and Meghan Malone, the children’s librarian who has been putting together a summer program. “They were here every day and did a lot of heavy lifting.” ![]() Marshall said she is proud of the fact the staff did a lot of programming during pandemic. A lot of people didn’t know how get things off their phones onto a computer into an email so they could get them printed. She said they also came up with a way for people to “send messages to our email so we could print things out. “We did lose a lot of our teenagers during that time,” she said, “and I think it had a lot to do with the schools giving them computers and hot spots and things so they could do all that at home because they used to come in and use our computers a lot, and we don’t as much of that anymore.” “They either stopped coming in or died during the pandemic,” she said. ![]() Marshall said when things became more normal again, staff learned they had lost a lot of patrons, particularly older people. We did Storytime online for a long time, and that really attracted a lot of attention and kept us in the public eye.” “And we had all kinds of programs started that we could access online. “We started the curbside service so we could bring books out to people so that there was no contact,” Marshall said. The Maine State Library system was holding meeting about the pandemic and had a lot of webinars about how to freshen up libraries and how to provide services in a new way.
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