The Haines Borough Public Library is planning to reopen Fridays and evenings, provided it can bring on the necessary staff and volunteers.

COVID-19 and budget cuts caused the library to scale back hours in 2020. The library closed on Fridays beginning mid-July after the Haines Borough Assembly cut $42,000 from the facility’s roughly $450,000 budget to help offset reductions in state funding and an anticipated loss of sales tax revenue from the COVID-19 shutdown of tourism. The cut resulted in the loss of two part-time circulation clerk positions.

The library is now trying to hire one or two part-time workers in order to reopen Fridays. For many library users, it’s welcome news.

“I always get mad when I find a book I want on Friday, and I can’t just go and get it,” dedicated library user and former library employee Linda Moyer said. “My feeling is that public libraries are the one true thing in American culture that are open to everyone, no matter if they’re rich or poor, or homeless or living in a castle, the one place where people can come together to be alone and read, or meet a friend. There aren’t a lot of public places in Haines where people can get together, and it’s free and our taxes pay for it, so it should be open every day.”

Moyer is not alone.

“I have had many comments from people in the community who would like to be using the library on Fridays, and we ran the budget numbers and figured out how we could pull it off and decided to prioritize that,” Haines Borough interim manager Alekka Fullerton said.

She said she’s also planning to recommend that the assembly fund the library at a level that allows it to remain open seven days per week in the next fiscal year. “Access for the public should be the last thing to go,” Fullerton said.

At the same time, the library is putting out a call for volunteers to try to get enough help to reopen in the evenings.

“We’re asking all of our volunteers to call us. We would like them to come back in so we can open up for evening hours,” director Carolyn Goolsby said. “Many of the volunteers were not comfortable being in a public-facing role during the pandemic. We’re thinking that as things have calmed down—Haines has only had a few cases and lots of people are vaccinated—they may be more comfortable coming back.”

Traditionally the library has been staffed entirely by volunteers between 5 and 8 p.m., and some volunteers say they’re ready to get back to working evenings.

“I was a hermit to start with, so with COVID, my life hasn’t changed drastically, but (staffing the circulation desk at night) was one of the cases where I regularly got out of the house and got to talk with people. You run into your friends and neighbors regularly,” longtime library volunteer Bill Broste said. He said he thinks library access in the evenings is particularly important for people who work full-time jobs.

“Having things open in the evening, not a huge number of people would go in, but my impression was that a big number of those people who came in, couldn’t come in any other time,” he said.

Along with a push to expand hours, the library is also expanding some of its programming options this spring as the community’s pandemic restrictions loosen.

“We’re going to allow meetings of groups of up to ten in the large meeting room. Masks are now recommended but not required, and we’re going to start doing story times on April 5,” Goolsby said. She said the library has also stopped quarantining materials as studies suggest that’s not how the coronavirus gets transmitted. She said the library will reevaluate its policies as necessary.