 This year during National Library Week university libraries wanted to honor our faculty and staff who work behind the scenes to make accessing our electronic resources possible. For National Library Workers Day on April 21, 2020, we asked some of them to share what they do, why it's important, and how they are coping with the new realities of working from home and social distancing. This video is a compilation of their responses. Hello, my name is Brenda Lewis. I am the Library Electronic Resource Specialist for the University Libraries. My job entails enabling the electronic resources, which include electronic books, electronic journals, and databases. I've tried to take advantage of some of the resources that we have in the library as far as some of the films and videos that we have. I watched the documentary that was really interesting to me. My name is Lindsay Lowry. I am the Electronic Resources Librarian. Right now, all of our faculty members and our students are all working from home, and it's more important than ever to make sure that all of our professors and all of our students can get to what it is that they need to get to. And I work on a team of four people, and it is our job, the four of us, to make sure that you have access to everything that you need in order to get your schoolwork done. All I'm doing right now is taking on new recipes and trying to find new fun things to cook in the kitchen. We are also weekly having Zoom parties with our family, and my nieces and nephews love to show off their new toys. They love to show off their dress-up clothes and do performances for us, and we meet every Sunday afternoon via Zoom to keep in touch with them. Hi, my name is Gabby Marks. I'm the ILL lending coordinator at the University of Alabama Library. We're working with five staff members on IRR requests, which includes lending, borrowing, and document delivery. On the borrowing side, we're getting materials for our patrons here at the University of Alabama, and again, it's from around the world. We are the ones who are looking for it, finding it, and providing it. I do a lot of gardening, cooking, and then with my husband, which works, we are playing games, do puzzles. We do a lot of Zoom meetings and the same with my friends and family, you know, like we're all worried, but we're coping and we're hanging in there. We'll get through this. I'm Donna Monner. I'm the Circulation Services Manager for the Branch Library at the University of Alabama. I supervise the day-to-day operations of the Angelo Bruno Business Library, the McClure Education Library, and the Rogers Library for Science and Engineering. If a patron has a question about a fine on their record and they're having trouble registering for summer classes, they can still contact us. We still have the ability to go in and look at their record and get the problem was off for them. But one of the really great services we've instituted is reference chat, and all of the branch employees are participating in that. Most helpful to me during this time of social distancing and working at home is trying to maintain a routine. When I log into work at eight o'clock every morning and for the first period of time, I check my email. There are certain things that I do. I have a schedule meeting at nine o'clock and I try to keep my day as normal as possible. My name is Jacob Robertson and I'm the Institutional Repository Specialist here at the University of Alabama. Basically, what the Institutional Repository is, it's an archive of scholarly works that we collect from faculty members and students alike who are interested in submitting their research publications. And what I do is I conduct the copyright research on the research publication. I usually take the CV of the faculty member or the student and I dig into the copyright policies depending on which publisher was used and I see what version of manuscript can be uploaded into the IR. What the IR does is it allows the opportunity for those who don't have the means to access these scholarly works to go on to ir.ua.edu and access thousands and thousands of research articles. So in order to cope with this new isolated lifestyle that we've been forced into, I've basically been trying to pick up new hobbies that I put down a long time ago like playing piano for example. Or maybe I'll dig into some artwork. I got this new drawing tablet that I'm trying to learn the ins and outs of, have Photoshop, courtesy of the University of Alabama OIT department, and work on my computer here and there. So these are some things that I've been doing. Hi, my name is Catherine Smith and I am the Systems and Technical Processes Librarian at the University of Alabama Libraries. So my main responsibilities are to keep the systems that power the library running. So typically that means the software that we use to power circulation functions and purchasing of both print and digital resources. But that also involves the mechanisms by which we provide off campus access to our licensed digital content. The University of Alabama Libraries have an incredible collection of digital resources and we want to make sure that our faculty, staff and students have access to those wherever they are, whether they're on campus or across the country. This is fairly important right now because obviously we have a lot of people working off campus who maybe never had before. So this is a brand new system that they're encountering. So me and my team are monitoring very, very carefully for reports. If anyone has any problems getting involved into the resources, not just during the day, we're keeping an eye out for those reports in the evenings and on weekends because obviously we're all working from unusual places and we all have unusual schedules right now. So to deal with a lot of the pressure of working from home and social distancing, I have been doing a lot of gardening. The weather has been fantastic so I and my spouse have been getting outdoors, we've been going out on walks. When I'm inside, I actually do a lot of needle craft. I am a cross stitcher so I have my little projects that I work on and I like to listen to podcasts. There are a lot of really fun podcasts out there going to history or science. It's not all bad news. There are lots of very fun podcasts out there to entertain yourself. Hi, I'm Carol Wyatt and I am the Technology Development Librarian and what that means is I write and maintain the code for the library websites. It would be really hard to access our amazing electronic resources without a portal to get to them. And that is what the website really is, is a portal to all of those resources. I'm not alone. I'm just one person on a team of people who maintain that website and make sure that the information is safe and that all of our patron information is safe. Last week we set up the Ask a Librarian chat feature that's available on the website currently. So that wouldn't have been possible without my team but also obviously the folks in reference. We've been playing a lot of lawn games, Frisbee and Croquet just so we can get outside and enjoy the magnificent weather that we've been having. We live right across the street from the park and thankfully they reopened the park so we've been walking around in there keeping our social distance from people. But it's been interesting meeting all of our neighbors since we've only lived here for about a year. Seeing our neighbors out and about and meeting them from far away has been really nice actually. So that's what we've been up to.