November: Book Potatoes Display

For the month of November we showcased our infrequently circulated books on our Book Potatoes display! I saw the idea on Pinterest and I had to make one of my own.

I started out by pulling 26 books that had not circulated in the last 5 years.

I did a google search for Mr. Potato Head and found many images of Mr. Potato Head accessories. I printed these out and cut them all out.

I then decorated the books with the accessories to make them look like Mr. Potato Heads.

I made a few signs explaining what the book potatoes were and I copied sayings from Pinterest, they were so clever!

For the top of the display I made a Book Potatoes sign using "wooden" blocks.

September: Genre Display

At the end of the last school year we completed our fiction genre-fying project. All the books were labeled and organized by genre. To start the new year, I decided to showcase the fact that our fiction section is now organized by genre with a genre display.

I used two of our bookcases to showcase the display. We have ten genres so I used five on one and five on the other. For the decor I used the same fonts that were used for the genre labels

I printed them out very large on colored paper (the colors of the actual labels) and then cut out each letter and taped it to the display, one genre per shelf.

I filled the shelf associated with each genre with books by that genre only. There was an extra shelf at the top and bottom of each bookcase, so I filled those with a mix of genres and added a sign on one bookcase that said "What's Your Favorite Genre?" and on the other bookcase that said "Our Fiction Section is Not Organized By Genre"

July: Postcard Summer Display

Wish you could travel this summer? Discover new places without leaving your house with this Postcard display!

I created "postcards" using the covers/locations of popular/new books in our collection. Here are some examples:

I then created signage for the display "Discover a new world this summer."

and then I cut out the postcards and the words and placed them all over the display!

I was able to find more postcards already made for Twilight and Harry Potter, I did not provide them here but you can search Google for them. Please feel free to use any signage!

Cataloging: Genre-fying Our Fiction Collection (Part 2)

I am happy to say that we have now finished the genre project in the Upper School (High School), the process is still ongoing in the middle school, but we should be done next year. Here is how we went about finishing:

Once we had entered genres for about half of the titles in the catalog we put some parent and student volunteers on labeling. I printed out a new shelf list that showed the new call numbers with the genres on them. Started with "A" our volunteers began labeling. We played with the best way of completing this task. In the end having a cart available in the aisle and pulling books off one by one turned out to be the preferred method for the volunteers.

There are several choices for the labels on the books and we pursued each of them. I really liked the idea of using plain white labels or even cut pieces of paper and then purchasing colors label protectors. However, we did not want to have to reprint all our spine labels, we needed a solution that we could add to the books we currently had. I took the time to research pre-made genre labels from Demco and The Library Store. We came to the conclusion that most of the images on the labels fit elementary and middle schools more than high schools. I then chose to create labels myself using well known icons for each genre, yet when we printed them and tested them out on our current books, it covered up a lot of the title and/or the author. I then created skinny labels that just had the name of the genre. I used different fonts to try and portray what the genre was about (for horror I used a spooky looking text...). We then took the genre labels with the images I had made and the genre labels with just the text to our Library Advisory Board and let them vote. They chose the version with just the text. This worked out well because on the majority of our current books we could fit the genre label below the spine label and not cover more of the book than necessary.

I found some small, skinny labels from Planet Label. We went with a pack of Pastel colors and a pack of Brilliant colors. This gave us 12 colors to choose from (we only have 10 genres). I was also able to download the label template from the Planet Label website and then paste in the genre text image I had created. The labels we used are here. The colors we assigned to the genres are as follows: Adventure: bright yellow; Dystopian: lime green; Fantasy: raspberry; Historical: light yellow; Horror: greyish green;  Mystery: light grey; Realistic: greyish blue; Romance: neon pink; SciFi: neon blue; Sports: neon orange. Here are the text files if you want to use them for your project:

We decided to put the genre labels at the very bottom of the spine for each book. If an older book had a spine label that was too low, for the genre label to fit, then the volunteer would pull the book and I would reprint the spine label. This way when you look at a shelf of all one genre they line up with each other.

Moving the Books:
Once the cataloging was complete we moved on to moving the books. Before any book was moved I ran reports in Destiny. I ran an individual report for each genre so I knew approx. how many books were in each genre. I then went through the shelves and estimated each could fit 20 books on a shelf. I printed out a floor plan of the library and wrote in where each genre would go. It seemed like we would not have enough room so we made the decision to move where our graphic novels were located and that allowed us to open up an extra bookcase.

We then started by moving all the realistic books to the now empty graphic novel bookcase. Then we slowly pulled smaller genres off the shelves and put them on carts and a temporary bookcase that we rolled in for the moving process. Once most of the genres were off the shelves we were able to get the rest moved into their correct places and then add back in the ones we had pulled. We did run into a few issues when books just did not fit as we planned, but being flexible made the process go smoothly. With tons of help from the student volunteers we had the moving done in days!

April: Graphic Novels Display

We are spotlighting our graphic novels for the next two weeks with this fun display! Our library parent volunteer pulled as many graphic novels as she could fit for the display. Then it was time to decorate!

I created some signage using Photoshop and printed it out. I was inspired by several displays I saw on Pinterest.

Then one of our student volunteers cut out the graphics. She then used construction paper and cut out similar shapes slightly larger to put behind the graphics, it helped give a more 3D effect.

For the top of the display I cut out large ZAP letters. I first made up a smaller version in Photoshop and printed it out, then I traced around the letters on construction paper to make them approx 7" tall.

There are so many things you could do with this display, I just love how it turned out!

Please feel free to use any of the templates.