The Public Library at Tellico Village reopened its doors with limits.

The library has offered bench pickup of book since June 1 thanks to Carolyn DeForest, library manager, and an assistant. That service is still available.

“Reopening was a really difficult decision because we have no guidelines or best practices to go on specifically for libraries,” DeForest said. “There has been no clear guidelines from either the national, state or local specifically for libraries, so we’re kind of on our own.

“I have met every week with all the library directors in our region — our region includes nine counties — and we have been meeting every week since the beginning of all of this talking about what we’re all doing, what do we think the best practices will be, what’s working, what’s not working, what problems,” she added. “All those things, that’s what we’ve been doing because there’s no specific guidance from government.”

DeForest said library leadership has been taking recommendations from the Tennessee State Library and American Library Association, but there have been no actual mandates.

“We have masks out front, a big box I got from the county health department,” she said. “If someone walks in and says they don’t have one, we give them the mask. Then we’re trying to ask people to stay 6 feet apart, although we don’t have any monitors here to do that. So it’s kind of hard. Some libraries have a lot of staff and they have people looking to do different things, monitor that, but I don’t have that.”

DeForest said average daily visitation is getting back “close to normal.” On an average day, she estimated 150 people would come to the library.

In-house classes and lectures remain unscheduled until further notice.

“We’re trying to distance people, and we only allow three people in the computer lab at a time — we only have three computers turned on,” DeForest said. “So only three people in there, and everyone should wear a mask. We’re doing the best we can. It’s just day to day.”

The Friends of the Tellico Village Library board voted Thursday to allow rental of the courtyard.

Liz Hall, Friends president, said the courtyard would be a way for the library to make a little extra income as long as people adhered to safety guidelines.

“The reality is that offering something doesn’t mean that people will come, and so it’s available if somebody wants to use the courtyard they certainly can contact us,” Hall said. “But they can’t have 100 people. They have to understand the mandates that the governor put in place that are effective (until) Aug. 29.”

The two largest fundraisers — 4 Bs and the annual book sale — have been canceled.

“We just couldn’t feel that it was the right thing to do,” Hall said. “It wasn’t going to be necessarily a safe thing. We couldn’t figure how to social distance people, how to serve food with 4 Bs and the bottom line became we go through a good bit of work to do this kind of thing and there isn’t a guarantee that anybody would feel safe enough to come. So based on those scenarios, we looked long and hard at that, but there’s just no way we wanted to project to the community that we wanted to have any kind of an exercise or anything that would be outside that would put our valuable patrons at risk for money.

“It’s all about keeping everybody as safe as they can be right now,” she added.

Hall said she looks at the COVID-19 confirmed cases every day. While Loudon County’s isn’t as high as others, she realizes many others come from outside the area.

“It’s just too dangerous,” she said.

Making up lost funds is a “work in progress,” Hall said.

“What we always do is about September and October we send out a newsletter with a mail-in form giving our patrons an opportunity to become our friends,” she said. “Frankly, that is the only way that we are going to have any dollars coming in until next year when we can figure out when we’re going to have a book sale and that has been scheduled in April, all things being equal, and we always have the fall 4 Bs. We hope that come spring we can also have the ladies golf outing. Right now everything’s up for grabs.”

The library is selling books and puzzles. For more information, call 865-458-5199 or visit www.tvlibrary.org.