Eventually, as the calendar shifted from spring to summer, we settled on a plan and some dates — having groups of eight enumerators be trained in shifts over the course of the first week in August. For those unfamiliar with our Headquarters in San Francisco, we are fortunate to have a 600-person auditorium we refer to as the Great Room, which was well-suited to conduct this safely. It has large windows and doors that are able to remain open, large fans circulating the air, and a separate entrance for folks to come and go.
All told, 40 people were trained to buy sales lead help conduct the census in and around San Francisco. a larger extent, but such is life in 2020. It’s hard to tell how much of an impact this had, but we hope it helped, and it remains important to us to support these often unseen but critical aspects of how a community and a society functions.
Hopefully, we’ll all be around in 2030 the next time the census rolls around and we can further assist this effort. To learn more about the census, follow the link below, and be sure to thank a census worker if you run across one.
“Access is the biggest benefit. And when you have a public health crisis, the benefit is even more pronounced having these materials online,” Murray says. “It’s also available to anyone around the world who can’t travel to Princeton….It seems like a natural extension of what the library has always done.”