⇤📚Throwback Reads are Here!

Excitement fills the air as we unveil our latest addition to the library collection: Throwback Reads! Thanks to a generous grant from Casey's, we've been able to stock our shelves with beloved middle school favorites that students have been requesting. From timeless classics to contemporary gems in both chapter book and graphic novel formats, these books are sure to evoke fond memories and spark new adventures for our high school readers.

With Throwback Reads, students can rediscover old favorites and share the magic of beloved stories with a new generation of readers. Whether it's revisiting the fantastical world of the Amulet series, embarking on thrilling adventures from author Stuart Gibbs, or hanging out with Greg Heffley again, there's something for every reader to enjoy.

This new section of the collection required quite a bit of movement of existing genres on the shelves. While an open bookcase was available, it was between other genres. Shifting the Adventure books allowed for the Throwback Reads to be shelved in the first case.

And while we're moving parts of the collection, why not undertake a large weeding project in the science fiction genre to be able to move the expanding thriller/suspense books into a larger space? 😀

For now, the collection is settled into their new places, and in moving one-third of the collection's genres, we're satisfied that books are on cases that will allow for continued expansion of the collection. So come on down to the library to not only see how we've rearranged but also to check out these nostalgic treasures. Let's embark on a journey down memory lane and celebrate the joy of reading with Throwback Reads!

📖🔍 Dynamic Shelving Makes Its Debut in the Library

With the change of the semester right around the corner, it's time to unveil a transformative change in the library, too--a change that promises to elevate students' reading experience! 📚✨ Say hello to NEW shelf organization, thoughtfully curated to showcase favorite authors and popular book series. This dynamic shelving is influenced by Kelsey Bogan from the Don't Shush Me: Adventures of a High School Librarian blog and her work in her own library.

The image above shows what the historical fiction and supernatural bookcases looked like before dynamic shelving--👀 take a look at the image below to see how it's been transformed!

Imagine strolling through our shelves, where every turn reveals a newly organized collection of books. From the timeless classics to the latest releases, the revamped organization ensures students can effortlessly find the authors they love and seamlessly dive into captivating book series. Between the genre categorization and the chunking and displays of dynamic shelving, there's no more hunting for that elusive title or wondering where a preferred series is hiding. The user-friendly layout is designed to make students' literary exploration easier, allowing them to spend less time searching and more time lost in the pages of a great book.

The thriller genre featuring dynamic shelving.

Ready to embark on a new literary adventure? Visit the library to take a look at the new organization! Your next reading journey awaits!

👏👏 Celebrating Collection Development & Improvement

 After a two years of deliberate weeding and intentional purchasing, the nonfiction part of the collection is something to celebrate!

In just one year's time, the average copyright age has improved by four years, and the nonfiction books are now nearly 20% of the entire collection vs. 15% in August of this school year. 

Upon moving to the high school a year ago, it was evident that the nonfiction collection had been neglected. Years ago--under different building leadership--the nonfiction collection was significantly impacted by decisions related to a library remodel. It's taken more than five years to recover to this point, so while the current stats might be paltry by some standards, they're pretty impressive considering where we started. 

So how did this happen? Small steps with focus! Because of the popularity of graphic novels, that was the focus area last year. Using grant money and a portion of the budget, including using a subscription to graphic novels from a vendor, the graphic novel shelves began to fill and appeal more broadly to students. Gone were the older graphic novels and those that primarily appealed to younger readers; instead, students could choose current, full color, popular titles. Here's how the case looks now:

And this year? After hearing from students about what they were interested in, the nonfiction collection grew in these areas: biographies, true crime, poetry, and history. Many of the true crime and history purchases also fell under the "narrative nonfiction" umbrella, like Blood and Germs, and American Murderer: The Parasite that Haunted the South, as well books by Erik Larson and others. Another focus area this year was agriculture-themed books. After receiving a grant from the Iowa Agriculture Literacy Foundation (see earlier blog post), these 12 books also helped bolster our growing nonfiction collection and were popular among a broad range of students.

With measurable improvement so prominent in the nonfiction collection, it's inspiring to think of where the collection can be in another year's time! 

Genre-fying the Collection, Part I

Last fall we opened a new 7th and 8th grade building, and at the time, we secondary teacher librarians decided that after years of talking about genre-fying a collection, this would be a good time to do so. With brand new shelving and boxes & boxes of books, it seemed like the time was right to organize the new building's collection into genres. The librarian there worked closely with our vendor and rep, who was very helpful, and when the building opened last August, students had a genre-fied collection.

After talking with the librarian throughout the year about student browsing, enthusiasm, self-sufficiency, and circulation numbers, I decided to genre-fy the high school collection as well. Incoming freshmen will already be familiar with a collection organized in this way, and returning high school students will now be able to browse according to the genres they often ask about.

Before I started this work, the fiction collection was arranged alphabetically by author. Only graphic novels and nonfiction were separated out.

First, I worked with the librarian in the new building to align my genres to hers, and shelf signage and spine label colors will also match as closely as we're able to do so. Altogether, the high school collection will have eight genre-fied sections: realistic fiction, thriller/suspense, adventure, sports fiction, historical fiction, supernatural, fantasy, and science fiction. Then, I too talked with our vendor representative, who helped answer questions I had and arranged for me a spreadsheet of the fiction collection. 

The original spreadsheet was overwhelming and too much to consider--really, what I wanted to see were titles and recommended genres. I added genre-specific pages to the original sheet and hid columns I didn't need to see.

Then, it was time to pull books--lots and lots of books! Realistic fiction was going to be the largest of the sections, and I knew I wanted these books to line the bookcases along the wall, so rather than pull any of these books, I pulled books from all of the other genres. Over the course of two work days, I stacked books into piles, leaving realistic fiction books on the shelves.

Of course, before I shifted everything remaining on the shelves to the long wall, I walked the cases again to make sure that only realistic fiction remained, which was not the case. I spent part of a morning making these decisions and adding books to their appropriate genres before moving everything over to the long wall. This is where all of the realistic fiction books are now located.

With realistic fiction moved onto cases, it was time to turn my attention to the rest of the genres. While the spreadsheets gave me a rough idea of how many books would be in each genre, I wanted to have a better count, especially after moving around so many books. In some cases, the original number and what I ended up with were within 1-5 books; in other cases, I was off by dozens! The counting definitely took a lot of time, but I was glad to have taken the time. 

Since I could use the realistic fiction shelves as a guide, I could estimate how many books per shelf I could put in the rest of the cases, so the rest just came down to the math. I counted shelves, wrote genres on Post-It notes, and just played around with where books should go. In the end, I only had to switch around two of the genres when I started placing books on shelves.

Thrillers/suspenseful reads filled one side of a short cases:

On the opposite side are the adventure books and sports fiction. Intentionally, I left a column of shelves empty to allow for signage and displays.

The second short case has the fantasy on one side, along with empty space, and the historical fiction and supernatural on the other side.

With empty shelves spread throughout the cases, the long case that used to hold W - Z of the fiction and the graphic novels will now house science fiction, with two shelves remaining open to allow for growth and collection development.

Once the books were all back on shelves in the genres, I created resources lists with the same names and scanned books into the appropriate lists. This will allow me at a later time to assign sublocations to these books in the catalog.

So what remains? A whole lot of signage! I plan to use signage that matches or closely matches the signage at our new building, so I will need to work with my colleague to get this signage or to create new signage. These posters will be in colors that I plan to use as "markers" for each genre. Rather than put a descriptive label somewhere on the spines of the books, I have translucent, colored circle stickers to place over the spine labels. These colors match the colors on the signage.

But that's for another week this summer--it's time to take a break and enjoy family, friends, and travel before coming back to this work later this month or maybe even July. Stay tuned for the progress!