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Monday 31 December 2007

I'm not reading that - it's old!

As regular readers may know, I m approaching my first anniversary as a School Librarian. When I started I had worked before in business and government but never in a school so for a while I was flying blind (pun intened).

There didn't appear to be that many user-friendly ideas for school librarian newbies on the net so I wanted to put a few tips on here for future newbies.

Our library is quite large for a school library I'm told. I've never worked in another one so I have to take their word for it, anyway there's over 20,000 books in it. While I know there is a need to keep up to date on new literature, in fact we are always buying new stock, but there's a lot of books there that just never gets read - and there's some really good books there that I read when I was in school.

So here's what I did:
  • Made genre specific displays. i.e. science-fiction, horror, historical...
  • Face out displays on the shelves
and my favourite, a tiny bit of trickery...

Choose books which don't look that old. My first one was Dreameaver by Louise Lawrence. This was published in 1997 and was last taken out of the library in 1998. A perfect candidate and actually a really good book for sci-fi fans.

Next, I took out the date stamp sheet and put a brand spanking new one in its place and placed it casually on a window display (we have odd books on them (another of my 'innovations').

Within days it was taken out as the childen thought it was a new purchase. it has been borrowed since then as well. Critics among you may think that the child would have picked it up because it was out of the main stock. However to test this theory of mine I had removed it and artfully placed it somewhere else a month before with no success. As I mentioned before in this blog - a little trickery gets 'em reading!

Gee I hope they never read this or they will get wise and my circulation will go DOWN.

Librarians 3, Children 0 :-)

1 comment:

jsi said...

Exactly - my own chldren react to the displays on the shelvesthe exact same way. Circulated and displayed the way you describe, and they are reaching for authors who wrote precious jewels years ago, yet they resemble the same procedure a book store would show off a new title.
It can be so sweetly predictable...

Do you believe in Chartership?