Ashley Borman, Technical Services Librarian at the Clintonville (WI) Public Library, is back with another collection development - and weeding - column.
Do you have a Holiday section in your library? Are the
Holiday books all listed under just “Holiday – Author Name”? How do you find
the books you want for each season or holiday? When I started working at my current
library, there was already a Holiday Section in the picture books. But it was
chaos. Everything had the same generic green holiday sticker on it and was
under the authors last name. It made things very difficult to find, especially
for lesser known holidays.
A few years after I started, when I was settled in and
comfortable with making changes, I talked to our children’s librarian and we
started a fix to this issue. We bought specific holiday stickers for
Valentine’s Day, Easter, Fourth of July (just a flag), Halloween, Thanksgiving,
and Christmas. We put these stickers over the Holiday sticker that was already
on the item. Instead of putting them all back in alphabetical order, we put all
of each of the specific Holidays with their own sticker on separate shelves.
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| After picture of the reorganized green holiday stickers next to the rest of the holiday books. |
There are still a few shelves with the generic holiday
sticker, but it made it much easier for us to identify and pull books for
displays and teachers, and the kids love it because they can find what they
want more quickly too. After almost 10 years, we decided the specific holiday
stickers were no longer enough. Our generic green Holiday sticker shelves were
getting stuffed, and we still had trouble finding all of the lesser-known
holiday books for a specific holiday when we wanted or needed them.
Earlier this month, I pulled all of these books and did a
weed based on condition, usage, et cetera. We discarded a lot of old and crusty
books. To reorganize these items, we re-labeled them with the name of the
holiday and the first initial of the author. So Groundhog Day books are all
together under Groundhog, all of the Diwali books are together under Diwali,
Hanukkah under Hanukkah, and so on. It is now so much neater and more
organized, and specific holidays are a breeze to find!
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| Closer
view of one of the newly re-organized shelves. |
