February: Blind Date With A Books, Take Three! Display

It's that time of year again, Blind Date With A Book! Everyone's favorite interactive display! This year I chose to do a flower theme instead of a heart theme as in the years before. With our new Silhouette Cameo I was able to cut out dozens of 3D flowers, making this display gorgeous!!

Each book was wrapped in either a metallic purple or metallic green wrapping paper. I cut out vines and flowers to put on the books, along with either a leaf or flower that gave a brief description of the book, genre, theme.

As with the last two attempts at this display I used similar signage to explain the display and how it worked. I numbered the back of each wrapped book and provided a signout sheet for students to checkout the books.

You can read more detailed instructions  in my first Blind Date post

Hope you liked this version of the display!

October: Halloween Slime Display

It's Halloween time and the library has some awesome displays this year! Our first display is covered in slime! I got this idea from Pinterest, it was easy to make and looks great in person.

I started off by getting a stack of lime green paper. I cut out five different variations of slime and then used those as templates to cut out approx 40 pieces of slime.

For the top three shelves I taped the slime of the inside top of the bookcase along with the outside edge. The bottom four shelves you couldn't see the inside well so I only did the outside.

I made a sign for the display saying "It came from the library." and I made a second sign for our website.

October: It's A Mystery Display

October is National Mystery Month! There are several great ideas for mystery displays on Pinterest, Google and personal blogs, it's hard to pick just one! Our Library Advisory Board students had asked for more displays like Blind Date With A Book. They liked choosing books based on other facts besides the cover. I incorporated this idea into our new display, It's A Mystery.

Did you know that there are more than 8 types of sub-genres for mysteries? I did not. For this display I chose to focus on only five sub-genres: Historical, Crime, Thriller, Detective and Romantic. We Genrefied our fiction collection last year and it allowed me to pull reports on sub-genres very easily. I made five resource lists of books and printed them out. I made an excel spreadsheet of all the barcodes for each book and numbered them 1-27. A volunteer pulled the books and one of our Student Library Assistants put the books into brown paper bags, wrote the number I had given on the back of the bag, and kept them sorted into their five piles. This process took much less time than wrapping each book in paper like we did for the Blind Date With A Book display.

I created five different "logos" to represent each sub-genre. These were printed and cut out as decorations for the display.

Each "Logo" had a symbol to represent the sub-genre, I printed out these symbols and our student assistant glued the corresponding symbol to the correct pile of books. This was the only clue students got to know what book was in the bag.

I made a signout sheet so students could write the number on the back of the bag and their name to checkout the book. This way they remained completely in the dark about what book was inside the bag until after it was checked out.

I made signage explaining how to check out the book and put it on the display.

For decorations I used the "logos" I had made, along with text saying "It's A Mystery." I used question marks and the classic Who? What? Where? How? Why? When? and cut them out and put them around the display.

Overall it was not nearly as popular as the Blind Date With A Book display. I think it was too difficult for students to know what was in the bag and they shied away from checking them out. If I did it again I think I would include something like "If you like....." to the front of each bag and a better clue as to what is inside.  I have an idea for a Scrabble display using books that are wrapped, we will see if that is more popular.