It’s that time again – member visiting time!! You know that we love to visit all our member libraries, to see all the neat things you guys are doing!!
This visit was to see Audrey and the good things they are doing at the Mississippi Heights Elementary School. And as you can see below, they are doing all kinds of nice things for their community members!
Especially when community members are going to be younger, I absolutely love to see bright colors and fun furniture. Our whole purpose as library people is to bring in people, and encourage them to use all of our stuff. This kind of thoughtfulness in design is a great example of promoting the library as a good place – one that is interesting to kids (and adults!).
See? This is both really cute, and very welcoming. (I really had to be fast in here to get pictures without the crowds of kids getting in the shot!)
One more, just to show you some of the possibilities you can set up in your own library. Furniture than can move around as your patrons want, to suit their individual needs, is always going to be a great thing to provide. You want people to be happy, and to use your stuff; good furniture is an important part of providing that environment, so think about what you are putting out and how you are sharing it.
And of course, we are known for our books! We provide information in a variety of formats that will be useful to our patrons, and here you see a great example of this. These are books aimed at the youngest kiddos, who have trouble navigating books upright on the shelves. So this is a display of books just for them, at just the right height for them to easily see and grab what they want! I love seeing this kind of attention to usability. It’s easy to get caught up in making a library work for the staff – but we need to focus on being sure everything is set up to make it easy for our targeted community members.
It’s our job to help with information literacy and instruction – and these signs are great tools!! I love to see this kind of explanation of books and genres. What a great way to help kids start to think about books they like, and books they may want to try!
And this was just fantastic!!! Guys: a confession. I hate the Dewy system. It is hard to understand, it’s hard to explain, and yes – it keeps things in a nice order, but it’s an order that is not intuitive for patrons to understand and find materials. So this kind of usability tool that helps people visualize the materials they want, and to easily find books they need – it’s just wonderful!!
And finally, especially in a school library, letting patrons know that they are important and valued is critical. We are not here just to stuff books in their hands and send them along; we are here to teach and help kids build skills. I was having a moderately tough week when I visited, and I have to say – I felt better reading this! I’m guessing it’s been helpful for other kids and adults. What a great idea!!
Check this out. You know you are in a library, you know you are in place where people care about your learning and development, and darn it – this is just cute!!
Thank you so much to Audrey and the entire staff in the media center, for inviting me over for such a nice visit!!
We want to come visit YOUR library next. Send us an email at admin @ cmle.org, and let’s set up a time to come to admire your library!
