You know that visiting members is always a fun part of our jobs! Visiting the Staples High School library was particularly fun, as their librarian, Gloria Palmer, is also a representative to the CMLE Board of Trustees! It is wonderful to have our members involved in the system, and to have members involved in the larger world of the profession.
It’s always exciting to walk into a library and see the cool stuff available! While all libraries are individual, and we are all evolving to serve new needs in connecting information with our community members; it is nice to see some standard ideas carrying across all libraries. We all have Circ Desks, and places where patrons can come to us for help.
And I love to see this kind of art in libraries!! We are all doing our part to encourage people to come use our resources, and creating a good environment is a part of that!
Gloria has spent a lot of years doing neat things in this library , and connecting the resources to the patron needs. You can see her here with nice shelves filled with books, and some books displayed on top of the shelves. (I love book displays!! It’s always a good idea to encourage people to take home material!)
Check out these nice displays!!! Incorporating art, or other cute things, into a display makes it more eye-catching. Adding in some unusual shelving also encourages people to look at the books, to touch them, and then hopefully to take them home. (These photos were taken at the end of the year, so books are all being returned.)
Remember: we want all our books to leave us, and go out into the world! I used to work for a crabby, poor excuse of a library staffer, who hated seeing patrons take books home. That is a pathetic way to run a library, and she was an embarrassment to the profession. Hopefully we have all moved on past that kind of thing to build much more lovely skills; and we know that we are here to share information with our communities!
This seems like a small thing, and hardly worth mentioning. Unless, of course, you are too short to reach the top shelf! Usability in libraries is always so important – and thinking about strategies for ensuring patrons can actually reach all of our materials is a great thing. Take a moment to walk around your library; can everyone reach the top shelf? In a lot of places, that is not possible for all patrons. If it may be a challenge in your library, what can you do to address it?
I always love to see schools and libraries reaching out to serve the information needs of their patrons. In this case, the library has set up special stations for the students to take the AR tests for book comprehension. You can see the stations set up, with instructions for students. The series of students I saw taking their tests all knew just what they should do here. Books in the library with tests available all are marked so students and teachers know which books have available tests – so handy!
This just made me happy! Again, think about connecting your resources and your materials with your patrons – and make that happen in a way that makes sense to them. If you want to force everyone to communicate in your way, that is not going to work. Using an assortment of communication styles and formats is always the way to go! (Plus, this is just too cute!)
While the library is very modern and current with all their offerings, it was so cool to see some of the information resources in the back room!!! Do you remember using microfilm and microfiche?? There is a ton of great information still in this format, though it isn’t used very often anymore. Most libraries have some of this still hanging around, and this library not only has some good info but also the devices to read it! (Probably not used much, if at all; but I do love to see old tech!) The box standing up is the Staples newspaper from February 1954 to December 1955.
If you have visited us at all, or seen photos of our office space, you know that we are big fans of decorations. So it was very cool to see the nice boxes, all labeled and ready to go for any decorating situation! We are pretty serious fans of Minnesota books and authors here (check out our Reading Across MN series, and our podcast episode on Minnesota books), and it was very fun for me to see a whole box filled with material ready to go for making some cool displays!!
This is just one piece of a pretty extensive packet of information that was just awesome to see. Each year the school sets up a Reality Store, with all kinds of booths and people from around the community. They give students the chance to “shop” around and to learn about all the great stuff they will work with in reality: car payments, insurance, bank loans, and more. I just love this kind of engagement! Helping patrons (in this case, students) to learn about their own information needs and to help give them some useful perspective on the kinds of information they will need, is just wonderful. And the community engagement just made this all sound very special!
And of course, any library is enhanced with the presence of a cat! (We have Lady Grey, the Official Office Dog, visiting us here at CMLE HQ; but we are – in conformation to the stereotype of the library profession – also big cat fans!) You can admire this photo of Dewey. He wandered into the library one memorable afternoon, and though he could not stay he left some warm memories behind! Awwww! Just the right place to end our visit.
Have we visited your library yet?? You know we want to come see you, so we can admire the work you are doing!! Let’s talk over the summer, and get some potential days set up for visits!
I’m a librarian! I like to have things labeled!! And when we are thinking about usability in libraries – always a key aspect of any library – making it very clear where all the different types of books can be found is a key to really implementing that usability!
I love to see unique features in libraries – and this stage area is just adorable! It is handy for hanging artwork on the side facing the rest of the library, and also has some steps and an area that could be used for performing or other fun stuff.
If you have been keeping up with our 
I love to see these shelves, sized just right for the patrons who will be using these materials! This school is preK through grade 5, so many of the patrons will not be very tall, and they will be interested in books that are fairly large. So these shelves are just right: a good height for easy browsing, and filled with books that are easy to flip through and lots of good cover art to admire! Thinking about the things your community members will need, and figuring out to best provide it to them, is the key to successful library services.
Another great example of this kind of usability is the labeling of the series books. As a very dedicated series reader myself, I always appreciate it when a library helps me out with finding the next book in the series. And in this library, these cute and handy book shelf tags are right there to help patrons find their next books!
Of course, in any school library students are not the only members of the community served by the library. Here you can see the packets of books collected for teachers to check out and use in their classrooms. This is an important function of a school library. We serve as information resources, and we support the information needs of all teachers, staff, and administrators. Developing and sharing this kind of resources is one great step in fulfilling that mission!
I tried to get some photos, but kids in costumes are very fast-moving! You can see some of them lined up here, waiting for their colleagues to finish parading and sharing their vocabulary words. It’s a little tough to make out the specific details, but you can just make out the yellow costume of the boy who was “light” all decked out in his glowing light bulbs! All the costumes were fantastic – these kids (and their parents) really did a lovely job of thinking through their words.
I tried to take pictures of people on stage, but they are just very cute looking blurs. So I grabbed this one of my library guide, Mary Berning, District Library Media Specialist for the Chisago Lakes Area Schools. Her word is so long it was hard to get in the photo: cruciverbalist, 
And finally, we got to see the meditation chair! Of course the schedule was packed and we didn’t get to experience the chair itself, but the person currently meditating looked extremely cozy and at peace! Meditation has so many health benefits and it’s fantastic to see the library providing these opportunities for self-care.