Are You Ready for Some Football!?!

I'm playing catch-up...AGAIN...so here's a quick rundown of the football display that has come (and gone)* since my last post!

Football is quite big in my new school community.  Before the first game of the season there was a huge tailgating effort called Dawgapalooza (since we're the bulldogs), there's a huge Homecoming parade (that my uber cute 1st grade daughter was a part of), and many of the male students from elementary school to high school participate in the sport.  As a librarian, you have to know your patrons, so I thought a big football display to kick off the season would be just the ticket.

 A big, glorious display of American football and Football (soccer) books!  I also have some lovely framed Sports Illustrated covers to add a little humor to the display.

 Being from a family that upholds and appreciates the real sport of football (ie, SOCCER), I also had to include that in the display.

 The soccer season for boys is also in the fall! 

 Check out this one.  Man oh man, sometimes I'm super glad this collection hasn't been updated in years.

Just a few photos of the individual shelves of the three panel display.  To come up with the books for the display I just spent some more time in the stacks of our humble library, pulling everything I could find!  Easy!

I had lots of fun making a collage sign to go with the display, too.  I love to do picture collages, so this was a perfect little extra fun activity I gave myself.

The pick up from the display was constant, and the return was also great.  I had a lot of students interested in the books displayed, and they were awesome enough to return them on time, so others could get them.  Yippee!!!



*NOTE:  This display was up from September 15-October 1 as a beginning of season celebration. 

Meet Your New Librarian!

I have been trying to figure out a way to introduce myself to the students.  I wanted to make it part of their orientation powerpoint during their first visit to the library, but I was adding too many slides (and the cable we have for the screen is incompatible with my laptop anyway, so I couldn't do the powerpoint).  Then I thought well, I could put some trinkets up, but the library doesn't have a lot of space for my things yet, since I'm STILL cleaning things out.  Finally...like a bolt of lightening it hit me: DO A DISPLAY [you idiot]!!!  Why I didn't think of that at first, I have no idea.  Even if the students don't get an idea for my pop culture obsessions yet, at least they'll know what books I love.  I hope they can start to get to know more about me through the ones displayed.

Both the fiction and non-fiction collections here are rather dated, but I still did pretty well with what I have to work with.  I have six sections to my display, and they all contain some of my favorites from our humble collection.  The six sections include: picture books, junior novels, classics, young adult novels, graphic novels, and informational texts.  Next to each section I also put a sign, with a picture of some of my other favorites.  Finally, I put a quick blurb about how the students can follow me on Goodreads or Shelfari.

Students have already started taking books from the display, and I've been filling in holes with others I love as they are checked out (to keep it looking pretty).  My choice of Raina Telgemeier graphic novels get checked out quite quickly.  (I've already loved seeing both girls and boys checking out Raina's work.  Before getting a job in a library, I wondered if boys would be checking out her mostly female-centered works.)

Summer Lovin'

OK, OK...maybe not Summer Lovin'...maybe Summer READIN', but after living with Grease my entire life, you can't say "summer" without hearing "lovin'" in your head.  (True story.)

Even though it's not summer yet, and all these poor Uni students still have Finals to get through, the Seniors' last day is THIS FRIDAY, MAY 15.  I've gotten to know a lot of them, and I'll miss them.  I wanted to give them some summer reads before they left.  (And, as of this post, TWO have already been checked out.  Considering the display has only been up since Thursday, that's a good goin'-rate around here.)

The theme of this display is Summer Reads.  There are a lot of summer love stories out there, but I didn't want to just focus on those.  I also chose some island books: classic (The Mysterious Island, Robinson Crusoe), survival (Lord of the Flies), and futuristic (Nil).  I put our big Woodstock book on display, hoping some music-loving students would want to flip through its pages to learn more about the Summer of Love.  And, there are also some books that take place during the summer, which are just really good stories (A Beautiful Lie).  I was excited to also offer two excellent summer/beachy graphic novels for the display, This One Summer (which was checked out so quickly that it's not in the photos) and Robot Dreams, respectively.

I hope you have a lot of summer reading on  your to-do list for the next couple of months.  Remember, even if you don't get a summer break, it should still be a time of rest and rejuvenation.  I hope you get some time to yourself to rest, rejuvenate, and READ! 

Display Fun

I think the best part about working in a library is finding new books to skim, marvel at, and dream about.  It is also fun fitting these into our New Books Displays.

We still have our New Book Overflow section, so that makes two new book spaces in the Uni High Library.  It's my job to place them on the displays after I've posted them to the new book blog.

This week I've had fun grouping...

new memoirs:

kick ass girls:

"romances":

Oh how I long to read Eat Brains Love and The Impossible Knife of Memory!

U.S struggles, controversies, and identity:

And, all together now:

What a great week to be a Uni High Library grad assistant!  

Welcome to 2015!

WHOA!  I totally stopped posting over Holiday Break, but that's what breaks are for...to pause, relax, and rejuvenate.

To be honest, it's been kind of hard to get back in the swing of things.  I think I might have had too much fun over break.  I didn't do much: had lots of Christmas fun, played with the three beautifullest babies in the world, hung out with my awesome husband, spent time with great friends, wore lots of Christmas sweaters...Yes, an outstanding, yet SIMPLE, time to be sure.

However, I was having too much fun and didn't get to do all the reading I envisioned doing.  In fact, I barely started a new book.  My imaginings of having lots of time off from class to read ended up being the reality of spending lots of time with my babes during the day, watching lots of Avengers-related stuff with my husband at night, and then being too sleepy to read.  What a bad librarian!!!

 I did start Stephen King's latest book, Revival.  My son wanted to get me a book for Christmas, and he wanted it to be shiny.  While wandering around the bookstore, my husband saw Revival, showed it to  my son, and he approved.

 You can't tell here, but the physical copy has a shimmering sheen that met with my son's "shiny" approval.

It's off to a great start, with the main character facing moral dilemmas, drug addiction, and losing his mother and only sister in tragic ways...and that's all in the first 160 pages!  My goal was to have it finished by this week, but alas, that hasn't happened.  I hope to finish it soon, even though I have to read two novels by the start of class next Thursday.  I better get to readin'!!!

Here's to a great 2nd semester in the Uni High Library, a strong finish to my time in the GSLIS program, and hopefully I'll get some sleep along the way. 

Food & Gaiman

I made a diary entry about how "unfortunate" I was to create displays about food and Neil Gaiman.  I hope you know I was kidding!  I just realized I never posted the finished products.

I've known since the beginning of the year that I would do a food display for the Thanksgiving season.  I had fun just roaming around our collection pulling books that had to do with food: I pulled fiction, graphic novels, memoirs, and non-fiction.  I couldn't fit all of the cookbooks we have, so I tried to put a good variety.  Praise be to the heavens that the Uni Collection does have what I think is my most favorite food book of all time: The Gallery of Regrettable Food.  When I worked at Pages for All Ages, we used to pour over this book at the Info Desk.  It is one of my all-time ultimate favorites.

I also made some signage for the display, encouraging students to ask for help if they need to find more food books or want to search for them at one of the public libraries.  I had to use a still from Oliver for this...of course.  This is also how I got a photo of Jamie Oliver included.

The Neil Gaiman display also turned out well and included signage.  Since he's the author of the month, I included info about him: vital stats, his work, his social media sites, etc.  It was great fun collecting his books for the display, but a lot of his books are checked out--no shocker there. 

He's one of the biggest advocates for libraries, and for some great personal stories he has about libraries and being a book nerd, check out these links:

• Libraries are Cultural "Seed Corn"
• Reading Agency Lecture