At last a day off! I hope you get at least one this week too, and that you are able to use it exactly as you need to. (Can you tell my culminating semester project is due the week after Thanksgiving, and I’m a little stressed about it?)
Grad school is having a “catch up on your reading week,” and I thought I’d use this pause between catching up on my reading and getting started on the two papers a week I have due between now and December 6, to report on how it’s going nonfiction-wise at my middle school library. TL;DR: Nonfiction circulation is up. Way up.
Like really hot. Stay safe out there, folks.
In my last post, I mentioned maybe doing pop-up displays with a mix of themed books from all parts of our collection to increase interest in our nonfiction offerings. Here’s my first attempt, themed around figuring out middle school. It includes a mix of graphic novels, fiction, biographies, and nonfiction books on various school, relationship, & health topics.
My goal for this school year is to boost circulation in our nonfiction section. So far, I’ve rebalanced the entire collection to remove gaps, eliminate overstuffed shelves, and add more front-facing books. This week, I used WordArt to redo the nonfiction signs using thematically shaped word clouds that reflect the topics contained in each section.
Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about our fiction collection. Before leaving for the summer, I redid our fiction shelves to make them more browse-able too.
I continue to be obsessed with finding ways to make our nonfiction section feel more like the nonfiction section in a bookstore, and less like an inscrutable wall of books organized by arcane numerical wizardry. This week, how I’m planning to use the front half of the library to drive traffic to the back (where the nonfiction lives).
As I mentioned last time, my current obsession is finding ways to make our nonfiction section feel more like the nonfiction section in a bookstore, and less like an inscrutable wall of books organized by arcane numerical wizardry.
More than half of our collection is nonfiction, yet only about 14% of the books checked out in our library are from the nonfiction section. Most of those are for class assignments. And yet, this section is full of gems. Is it possible to entice students to browse our nonfiction section like they do our fiction stacks?
News broke this week of particular interest to us here at Caterpickles Central because it touches on a 10-year-old question of ours: Did dinosaurs have belly buttons? Y’all, I think we may finally have our answer.
CATERPICKLES 