Response to the Pandemic and Lockdown

Culture Perth & Kinross Trustees Annual Report

Year ending 31 March 2020

Response to the Pandemic & Lockdown

After the first lockdown of the year, board meetings moved online, and were held monthly, rather than quarterly. This gave the Board a detailed oversight of the organisation during a time of uncertainty and offered the Executive Team support as they pivoted as much activity online as was possible whilst establishing homeworking policies and procedures for staff to ensure safe working practices were undertaken whilst working remotely.

Support and assistance to the local Covid response

Used 3D printers and printed 1500 sets of PPE Face Shields
Stocks of gloves donated to local care providers
Food donated to local Foodbank.
Social media used to promote public health messaging

Spend was diverted towards our e-library service providing additional resources for those at home during the pandemic.

Table 1. eLibrary Use

2017/18 2018/19 2019/20 2020/21 Percentage +/-

e-books 6,742 7,398 10,859 23,687 +118%

e-audio 5,694 7,936 11,237 18,847 +68%

e-magazines/papers 9,043 15,931 29,254 2,824,581** +9,555%*

*New Pressreader service offering free online access to newspapers and magazines launched at end of 2019/20.

Library Letters

The Library Letters project was funded by Carnegie UK and paired our most vulnerable Books on Wheels customers with staff volunteers in a pen-pal letter writing relationship.

Letters were delivered and collected via the Books on Wheels

Participants were supplied with stationary, should they choose to respond

response was immediate and heartfelt

we now have 34 customers receiving letters, demonstrating that a positive impact on an individual can come from even the smallest project.

“Getting a handwritten letter is such a treat, one can re-read it and usually pick up something one missed the first time.”

“Thank you so much for your friendly letter bringing a bit of the outside world into me. It is a strange situation we live in; I only see the men who deliver my shopping and my library books, thank heavens for them.”

“I really so enjoyed reading your nice letter, so full of thoughts to reply to ... it made my day, especially since I am alone here and have lost all my family”.

“I do love hearing from you and this letter writing is such a good idea”.

Libraries in Lockdown

Our library services and pandemic response were highlighted in the ‘Libraries in Lockdown’ report produced by REID, P. and BLOICE, L. of Robert Gordon’s University, Aberdeen.

Covid-19 Collecting Project

Culture Perth & Kinross launched a Covid-19 Collecting Project in May 2020 to record people’s experience of the pandemic through records, objects, creative responses, stories, and an on-line survey. Over 400 people have completed the survey giving their personal insights to the pandemic and how it has affected their lives, families, and local communities.

Supporting Home Schooling

Acknowledging the challenges of home schooling and how much schools and families were missing their visits to our libraries and museums whilst these were closed, staff worked to identify new routes to accessing our collections and resources. As a result of this a new website CPK Play was created.

created an opportunity highlight existing resources
create new meaningful content based on feedback and identified user needs.
The wesbite has been used by Museums Galleries Scotland as a case study of good practice.

‘I will definitely be signposting my parent carers to your website, so many resources! I love how interactive it is. Really easy to follow too.’

Exhibitions at home

Following the success of CPK Play, a new exhibitions focused website was launched. CPKMuseums provides complimentary exhibition content and new online exhibitions and enables us to continue to deliver collections-based exhibition experiences even when our traditional venues are unavailable.

Supporting Visual Arts

We commissioned work from local artist Mat Dugard, who was given a brief was to produced something striking and hopeful that demonstrated our solidarity with our local communities. The resulting work was colourful pillar wraps Perth Museum and Art Gallery and designs on several key doors at the AK Bell Library.