¡Leer es Liberación!: School Library 2.0: A Picture Walk

Hello!
Well, it's certainly been a while. My first semester as school librarian has been BUSY! and I wanted to take this post to show off some of the many organizational changes I've made.

First off, here's the space as of May:

It's beautiful, right? I am lucky to have a spacious, lovely library with lots of shelf space. Unfortunately, the collection had not been maintained.

In summary:

Several shelves were broken.
There was no labeling of the different areas of the library.
Nonfiction series were scattered throughout the library; the Dewey decimal section was incredibly mixed up and very out of date.
Picture books and leveled readers were combined, and not organized in any fashion beyond a semblance of alphabetization.
Most books in Spanish - regardless of whether they were YALs, nonfiction, or E books - were spine labeled 468.6 (Dewey for Spanish foreign language) and stuck in their own section. They were alphabetized by author's last name. The other Spanish books were shelved correctly in their respective sections, but not demarcated by any Spanish language designation.
The collection had never been weeded or inventoried.

(We actually now have 420 students, so that ratio was more like 34... a great ratio, until you look at pub dates and quality of books and the fact that untold texts are lost.)

So I dug in my heels and rolled up my sleeves.
First stop (and a continual stop, of course)? Weeding nation!

As I began to weed and order and create categories & sublocations, I have to give a shout out to my great friend who showed me Destiny basics... and then all you legions of Youtube librarians, so succinct and helpful with any troubleshooting!

Fortunately, there was a summer school program in my elementary in June, so I was able to load up these preliminary weeds with some inviting FREE! ¡GRATIS! signs adorning their cart. Most got snapped up, and the rest - along with my continual weeding - are healthy additions to the front lobby lending library I help curate. I can't tell you how popular the sports books from the 1990s have been!

(Oh, and the problematic material? It makes great décor -- observe how I used a particularly egregiously racist biography of Davy Crockett: )

In the midst of this "robust deselection of material," I also began an ambitious project: genrefying the YAL books! The same great friend as above helped me organize, I put in an order to The Library Store, and we began. My girlfriend and friend and I spent a few dizzyingly long days in June sorting YALs.

I hope to write more about the benefits of genrefication in a later post, but suffice it to say that it has been UTTERLY TRANSFORMATIVE for my chapter book readers.

And speaking of those readers -- their first week of library, after ice breakers & expectations, was helping me finish labeling the books. One 3rd grade class alone did 9 shelves of books in half an hour! It means the spine labeling is occasionally a little wonky (or a lot wonky), but overall they did a great job. It also functioned as an informal book pass, generated excitement, and helped develop a sense of ownership. It also also saved me gads of time!

Before the first week of school, I had moved all of the picture books to create an E nook. It took two full work days to alphabetize those suckers. (To be fair, they were two very enjoyable days.) The fiction, then, now progresses from picture books, to leveled & beginning readers, to beginning chapter books (sorted by series), and then genre fiction.

(Looking more loved, no?)

The next giant project I undertook was interfiling all of the Spanish and bilingual books. What I did:

Separated all books into two groups: Spanish & bilingual.
Marked the Spanish books with purple, and the bilingual books with green (either sharpie on the spines, printing the spine label on paper of that color, or using a transparent spine label in that color). It would've been great to have one consistent system, but at the end of the day, it wasn't feasible for me to print labels for all 900-some books. So, for a good majority of them, Sharpie it was!
**For nonfiction books, however, I had to manually edit their record, correct their call number (they were all in 468.6, remember?), print their spine labels onto the correct color (purple or green), attach them, and then interfile them.**

This huge project, of course, led me into the next gargantuan ordeal... nonfic. Weeding, organizing, spacing, sorting, and labeling the nonfic. It took a long while, but it got done.

Isn't that nice? Also, you can see many bilingual books (note the green) and a few Spanish ones on the lower shelf. Thanks to Parent-Teacher Conferences, I got those groovy section labels done.

I also labeled the genres and the early picture book series for ease of location and shelving:

I also took the back of the picture book nook and turned it from a dumping ground to a First Steps in Reading section - though I have at least 5 different leveling systems from the books (there is a huge range in different publishers' perceptions of "emergent" and "beginner"), I have them, again, generally progressing from easiest to most difficult.