Hi everyone and Happy Earth Month! This month we will have a series of blog posts dedicated to different topics in sustainability. They will build on each other and hopefully offer you some new ways of thinking about the Earth and our place in it.

This is the last blog post and brings us back to the library to tell you what we’re doing to be more sustainable. This is only a starting point for us, and we hope to continue to grow in the coming years and adapt our library to the climate crisis. Below you can find some of our projects, with brief descriptions of what they are about.

Climate Action Week

You may have seen our blog post and corresponding display for Climate Action Week in November. This took both old and new materials from our collection on topics relating to music and the environment to showcase to our community.

Earth Month

For Earth Month we have tried out some new types of events. You may have attended our Swap Meet on April 1st – we had a great turnout for this and were so excited to see students engaged! We also had this blog post series where we explored topics in sustainability.

Something we’ve been working on internally this month is the Sustainable Offices project from Facilities & Services at U of T. We have been working to make sure our efforts behind the scenes at the library are just as sustainable as our external efforts.

General initiatives

Beyond these time-specific projects, we have also focused in on how we can bring sustainability to the library year-round. You can find our sustainability guide that centers music within sustainability. This will be updated each year by students working at the library, which brings a number of fresh eyes and new perspectives to it.

One thing that we are not responsible for but are very grateful for is the bird safe glass that has been installed on our building! Facilities & Services has been working on making all of the EJB windows bird-safe and we are so glad for it.

If you have thoughts on how the library can be more sustainable, we would love to hear them! Thank you so much for following along with us this Earth Month.

By Sabine O'Donnell, TALint Student, Music Library

Sustainability in the Music Library