Director’s Thoughts – 9/15/2021

I survived summer reading! But, there isn’t really a better way to say it. We’ve run out of space! We moved into our current space in the late 1980s after vacating a much smaller location. In 2007-08 a feasibility study showed that we had in essence run out of space. Let’s remember that in the 1980s computers were not as prevalent as they are now. And that also means that our infrastructure needs to be updated to really work with what we have.

Space Constraints

Let me back up a bit. I started working in my library in 2008 after the feasibility study was complete. At that point, the economy was in a downward spiral and the report was tucked away for better days. When I became director in 2016, I knew that one of my top priorities was to show our township board that we definitely needed a new, updated space that would allow us to expand programming and services.

We began a new feasibility study in 2019 and were ready to report to the Board in early 2020 and then COVID hit. We were finally able to report to the Board our findings and it shows that (surprise, surprise) our library is woefully too small for the space we truly need. In fact, we need to double our square footage. Unfortunately, we won’t be building/renovating any time soon, so it’s up to myself and my staff to be creative about our current space.

Parent/Teacher Collection

And that’s where the rejuvenation of our Parent/Teacher collection comes in. This past spring we spent a good portion of our time weeding our nonfiction sections in both the children’s and adult departments. With limited space and more books coming in almost daily, we needed to find a way to allow some of these areas to breathe. And that’s where the Parent/Teacher collection comes in.

We’re are a Family Place Library and with that designation, we are required to keep a Parent/Teacher collection near our play space for parents to easily browse. Our collection hadn’t been weeded in a long time, so we got down and dirty getting rid of old content with incorrect and inaccurate information and ordering titles that we needed more of, for example, titles dealing with mental health for kids.

Then, we decided to pull in some parenting material that our adult department had ordered. Every time we change something in terms of collections, it’s with the end-user in mind. Having all of our parenting information in one location makes a lot more sense. Plus we got to weed another section and provide a little space in the adult nonfiction collection.

Neighborhoods

Finally, we decided to create neighborhoods for our Parent/Teacher collection. Previously, the collection had been organized based on Dewey number. But things were difficult to find and some things were on separate shelves rather than all together. We first did our research and decided on six categories –

• Development
• Literacy
• School
• Special Needs
• Health & Safety
• Parenting

Then we literally pulled every book off the shelf to re-categorize them. Some were difficult to decide – parenting books about kids with disabilities or books about development and parenting at different ages and stages. But, in the end, we got everything organized and changed a couple of things as we did. We realized that we really needed another category for play-based learning books. Things like activities you can do with babies and toddlers, STEM and crafts specifically for a younger audience, outdoor activities, that kind of stuff. didn’t fit in any other category. So we created a “Play” category. Then our health and safety category changed its name to Wellness to be a little more all-inclusive of things from bullying to nutrition to yoga and meditation.

Next Steps

Our next step will be to change all the spine labels. We actually decided to keep the Dewey numbers within each neighborhood to keep similar topics together. We seriously considered going to an alphabetical by author situation, but in the end, we thought this type of browsing would be less confusing to our patrons. Again, always think of the end-user.

I’ve seen a number of articles about libraries creating neighborhoods for their picture book collections and although it’s something I dream of doing, I love that we started with this much smaller collection. We literally had to handle each title and will need to relabel each and every one which is very labor-intensive. I’m hoping some promotion of this newly organized collection and a great brochure explaining the different neighborhoods will make this a much better circulated collection and more helpful to patrons!