Spotlight Displays

It's about time I got back to you all. So today I thought I'd talk about displays! Mostly because all the pictures are already set for this one. Basically... I'm being lazy. Let's get started!

Every library has displays. I've done a few in my time... although many of them I don't have pictures of anymore. (I used to be very bad at documentation.) But here are a few for reference:

This is from another branch I worked at two years ago, roughly

The front and back of my 3D shark display from early last year

Not strictly a display, but taking up display space

Using myself as a display! More on this later

I'm very sad about some of my missing displays. I did an interactive paper crane display about four years ago for the Intentional Day of Peace. We had a replica of the Children's Peace Memorial in Japan and patrons made paper cranes for us to send to the monument (which I still haven't sent; some of the string broke and it's hard to find space to thread 1,000 paper cranes). Perhaps I'll revisit that display again this year. But I digress.

So we have two display spaces at my library location that are hurting. Most displays are on a rotation list and are taken care of by people throughout the year. Not these. Sadly, these are also the two near the teen section of the library, so shouldn't it be even more captivating not less?

Anyhow, our teen services librarian has come up with some passive program ideas and that's helped us fill up some of the space.

Before and after shots of April's passive program display

So that's filling out pretty well. We even had a decent number of people interested in creating some blackout poetry! (Happy--late--National Poetry Month by the way.)

The other display that's been hurting is just around the corner. It's a small, plain, black shelving unit that was supposed to be a graphic novel spotlight; partially because we have the only anime club in the system and partially because we had an overabundance of graphic noels. Unfortunately, we moved to a floating collection and our graphic novels all left! Now it's very difficult to fill up three shelves with related spotlight titles. Additionally, the space started to become a catch-all for fliers, bookmarks, handouts, etc. Which is great... but it was looking cluttered and sad; so Susan and I took charge of the situation.

Now the display is two fold. The first part is a program highlight display where we promote upcoming teen/teen interest programs for the month. We include titles related to the featured program as well as fliers and bookmarks (in addition to whatever other fliers and bookmarks need to be displayed for the month). The second part of the display is the original graphic novel spotlight. The only change to that is that the spotlight now ties into the program highlight as well. Easy peasy!

We've only just started this idea, but I'm happy with the results so far:

CSI program highlight featuring Case Closed

Jedi Training Day (now a May the 4th display)

I'm excited to see where this goes! This month is going to be tricky ... I have a tattoo program. Good thing more and more teen books feature tattoos! I wonder what graphic novels do... hmmm....