In tragedies, most people know their roles…
First responders race to the scene to face whatever awfulness awaits them.
Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel use their skills to do whatever they can to heal the injured.
Journalists try to capture, not only the story but the range of emotions that they and their audience is feeling.
Politicians put aside their differences to come together for the greater good as in this tweet where Sask NDP Leader, Ryan Meili retweets important information from Premier Scott Moe of the Saskatchewan Party who he normally sits across from in Opposition in the Saskatchewan Legislature…
Entire communities – whether that’s a town, a province, a country or everyone bonded together by a single sport – will rally together in amazing ways.
But if you’re a librarian, what can you do to help?
Depending on the library and its proximity to a major news event, I’ve seen a range of responses including things like libraries providing information services to setting up computer labs to providing books and children’s programming for people who need them. (During the La Ronge evacuations due to wildfires a few years ago, Regina Public Library did all of these things setting up what were basically makeshift libraries in the arenas where evacuees were staying until they could return home.)
My own response wasn’t to that level but today when I got to work, I wanted to do something to acknowledge the tragedy as I knew it would be front-of-mind for many patrons coming into my branch.
I decided to set-up a display of books right inside our front doors, picking a selection of books about hockey, about grieving and about spirituality as well as a few about related topics – Saskatchewan small towns and Canada in general.
Knowing emotions could be raw (mine definitely were!), I purposely chose to make my display low-key – no big signs to indicate what it was about, no pictures of the team or even the team logo, no books with titles that might bother people (we happened to have a book in the library about the eerily similar 1986 Swift Current Broncos bus accident that killed four players but since that book’s title is “Sudden Death“, I decided not to put it out. I didn’t even put any books whose might be similarly misconstrued or cause unintentional offense which means I chose not to include Wendel Clark’s “Bleeding Blue” in my display even though Wendel Clark is the prototypical small-town Saskatchewan boy who made it to the show.)
Below is a photo of the display I created and though I’m not sure how much it helped, I did note with interest that we closed today that a few of the books had circulated already – interestingly, more of the hockey books than any other kind I put out.
And in a strange way, I thought that was a reassuring sign that as horrible as this tragedy was and is, the thing that people were looking for the most (at least at my library, at least today) were reminders of just how wonderful and amazing the game of hockey truly is and how important it is to us as a province and a country.
If you haven’t already, please consider donating to Stars Air Ambulance and/or the GoFundMe for the families that are affected by this tragedy.
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