Concept Picture Books (or How to Make More Room!)

In my library our pictures books are shelved around a large square with shelves around the inside and outside of the square.  It’s a really cool idea – leaving space for families and kids to read on the inside and is open so that adults can see over the shelves to keep an eye on kids in the play area as well.  Unfortunately, the way our shelves are set up we have no room to expand the shelving unit to create more shelves in the same area.  And even with weeding our collection, we’re still bursting at the seams!
So, a few years ago when we received our Family Place recognition, we began moving our Parent/Teacher resources to another area we were lucky to have a large shelving unit next to our picture book area that was available.  We decided to pull out a few concepts that parents/teachers are constantly asking for – Alphabet, Colors, Counting, and Shapes.  This allowed us to free up a little bit of space in our picture book area, while also allowing patrons to easily find commonly asked for materials.  Last night as I was catching up with the blogs I follow, I came across this awesome idea from The Show Me Librarian, that I would love to do – “Little Learners Browsing Bins.”  Another take on concept books and straying away from shelving all our books according to the Dewey Decimal System.
Just last year, we also pulled out our Christmas books into the same shelving unit and we had hoped to add more holidays, but unfortunately ran out of space.  Now, over the past three months, we have continued to do a lot of weeding, removed the majority of our reference collection (adding much of it to our circulating collection) and have found a little more space again.  It’s my hope that (maybe) before summer reading we can again get back to moving our holiday books out of our picture book area and into their own shelving unit.  We’ve don’t a lot of shifting, weeding, moving, and deleting and our library is really beginning to look nice.  Outdated materials are out the door, the shelves look clean and bright and I’m hoping our circulation statistics will show what a nice, updated collection can do!