Friday, June 19, 2009

Mixing It Up! Reorganizing the Fiction Section

Okay, y'all can call me crazy if you want to. I have a student intern this summer, and we just had a discussion about marketing the fiction section, what works, what doesn't. Do we want to highlight certain books, topics, genres? You know, the usual displays of series books, mystery titles, whatever. Or do we really want to mix it up?

Well, we're going for it. At least for a couple of months. We're going to rearrange the fiction section by genre. Not a lot of genres, mind you. Just the biggies: scifi/fantasy, mystery, and realistic. At least that's the start.

What will happen? Will circulation increase? Will it be a nightmare to reshelve those books? We haven't decided on genre stickers yet. Will the children find it appealing?

Will we need to open up a coffee bar in the fiction section? Okay, so it's a little Barnes & Noble. But they sell tons of books. (Sure, Amazon is doing pretty good, too, and you don't even see their displays!)

What do you think will happen? What will be the impact? Would you think about taking the plunge into reorganizing your fiction section?

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Feeling Lopsided

While I know that we all got glowing reviews from our administrators, I wanted to share my personal revelation during my year end eval that I just had from my AP. I think I might have upset him actually, but I said to him, "This would be a great evaluation for an instructional technology facilitator. Too bad it only covers about one third of what I do."

I can't decide if I'm more upset that technology is the main thing that people recognize me for doing, or if I'm more upset that I'm not more demonstrative with the reading, books, research instruction.

I'm feeling sorta lopsided.

Do you feel torn between reading instruction, research instruction and techonology usage with students and staff?