New Book Display

Last summer during our strategic planning meetings, I decided I wanted to take charge of putting up book displays on the first floor of the library. I'm pretty sure when I said I was going to do it, some of my coworkers thought I was crazy. It is a time commitment to put something up every month (or twice a month depending on how ambitious I am).

Most of the displays have been pretty traditional. Graphic novels, YA books for Adults, March Madness (and other sports for the non-basketball fans). But the second display I did was homecoming. I ended up pulling books that had blue and white covers. A fantastic visual, but a bit of a challenge to pull for sure. (In case you're wondering, YA lit, sports books, aviation and gender studies have some great blue and white covers.)

This month, we stepped it up. For National Library Week, we decided to do a 'mystery' book display. I had seen the blog post from Maplewood Library. I LOVED the idea and knew I had to do it here. I ran it past Diana, who does all of our display cases; Anne Marie, who is usually the only person to tell me when I'm being too crazy; and Mary Anne, who usually sees the technical flaws. All of them thought it would be a great idea.

We tweaked it a little: colored wrapping paper, cutting the paper around the barcodes so we didn't create more work for the tech services or circ people, and numbers and a corresponding spreadsheet in case someone tries to track down a specific title we had wrapped up. And because we'd missed Valentine's Day by a few months, we decided to market it as a "Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover" display instead.

I'm pretty proud of it. Diana, our PR intern, and I pulled a bunch of fiction: YA, kid's, adult, and classic. The rest of the prep and set-up they covered. Our signs, as they have been for every display I done this year, were designed by an alum (also a fellow blogger and friend) Kevin.

I can't wait to see if any of it checks out. I'm having the circ students tally mark if any do. Even if they don't circulate, it's still a colorful and bright spring display. And unwrapping the ones that don't circ will be like Christmas in April :)