If you are reading this, you surely know that we love visiting our members!! It is absolutely the most fun thing we get to do in our jobs – and it’s because our members are always (always!) doing interesting things! (Small disclaimer: ALL libraries are doing interesting things. But we do think our 300+ members are special!)
These photos were from my trip to the Oak Hill Community elementary school – and as you can see, I had a great time! Thanks so much to Media Specialist Paul Olsen for showing me around.
I love to visit school libraries where the kids clearly know and like the library people. At this library, a teeny girl ran up to Paul and gave him one of her cakes she was passing out to celebrate her birthday!! It was totally delightful. A lot of our member libraries have this kind of thing happening, and I regard that as a very useful qualitative measure of library success! (No photos of the cuteness; as always, we are in favor of patron privacy and post no photos of any patron in any library.)
I had an idea this was going to be a fun school when I walked up to it. Check out this excellent dragon on the playground!! The snow sets it off beautifully, but I bet it’s super fun all year round.
I love these shelves! You can see throughout the library how the shelving is at different heights, to add to the usability for patrons who themselves are different heights. It sounds like a small thing, but libraries need to be thinking about these kinds of usability tools to make our resources accessible to all patrons. Our entire purpose is to serve our communities; making books (and other good stuff) easy to reach is just one important way to do that.
Here you can see shelves set up for smaller patrons. The picture books are arranged so they can be easily flipped through by small hands. One of the basic rules of librarianship is “Every book its reader.” This kind of shelving lets patrons spend the time to find the book that should go home with them!
It is always so nice to see all the open space. Of course, I love books (you probably do too); and being squished inside shelves loaded with books is a lovely afternoon for me. But again – think about usability and how to make your patrons happy. That requires some space to move around, to have a crowd in the library (kids often come as a group), and to have the space to just stand back and look at shelves. So it’s fun to put in tons of shelves everywhere; think about the traffic flow of patrons as they move around and explore, as they are doing here.
In several of these member visit reports, you know I’ve been very loud in my admiration of art in the library. We are an information profession, and information can be conveyed in all kinds of formats, including art. While these incredibly cute masterpieces probably were not intended to have deep meaning, nonetheless they were a way to explore and share information. Being displayed in the library is just an extra layer of cool!
These photos show an excessively cool area of this library! They are participating in the One District One Book program (modeled on One City One Book, started by rock-star librarian Nancy Pearl!), and they are all reading Ralph S. Mouse. The library has this section decorated to provide readers with the feeling they are part of the books!! (Look at that little mouse peeking out from the bottom of the clock – it’s adorable!) This kind of interactive work to connect readers to books is always great.
Check out these great book kits!! Being able to share books around and across classrooms, again – thinking about accessibility and usability of resources – just makes this great! I’m always happy to see kits, and to see the the organization involved here in getting these books sent to classrooms was very nice.
Check out these cute, and very practical, technology tub lockers! It’s so handy to be able to add tech to these locked boxes, and then to share them with users in other locations, so things are available when needed.
And what an amazing sign – and a great way to wrap up my visit to this library!