It's that time of year again, library folks! Summer reading, that program where we try to keep kids reading between school years by giving them every possible prize our library budgets will allow for. In exchange we get those sweet, sweet circulation stats that hopefully turn into future funding. What the holidays are to retail is what summer reading is to us.
This year's theme (and it is a universal theme across all American libraries) is Tales & Tails. Or is it Tails & Tales? Homophones are confusing. Either way, there are a lot of animals. At our library, we built a lot of programming and décor around these animal themes. For me, that meant a lot of painting and drawing.
I'm not usually a programs gal, but I conducted a few drawing classes this summer for kids that involved mixing up two or more animals. Lots of kids signed up, only a few showed up. But the kids who were there had fun, and in one class I let the kids shout out different animals and together we constructed some adorable crimes against nature.
To further promote these classes, I made some paintings from the creatures we created. I have named these two Sn'rex (Snail and T-Rex) and Tat (Toad and Cat):
We built displays to further promote our programs and prizes. We have a large bulletin board in our Children's room that needed some updating. Keeping it simple we created this image:
Of course, keeping it simple meant I spent a few weekends painting numerous animals and their various extremities. I've no shame in admitting how proud I am of the octopus arms, though.
For the adults, I only had one display I wanted to build, and it had nothing to do with animals. I love travel and our local community is well traveled. I knew people would be taking big vacations this year and that they would be bringing library books with them.
My idea is to track how many miles our books travel this summer. Additionally we can track all the interesting places they go. We decided to use a map of the U.S. this summer because of ongoing international travel.
Our most recent tally says our library materials have traveled 23,523 miles round-trip across the United States. The farthest our books have gone is to Fort Bragg, CA and back. These books are getting a lot more travel than me this year. Next summer we hope to use a world map. I can't wait to see the statistics we gather then! (Can you guess what type of librarian I am training to be?)
The last thing I'm going to include in here came from my co-worker, Emily. She wanted to create a cooperative display for our patrons to add to. We would make a peacock, and our patrons would make the peacock's feathers. I painted the body of the peacock (which felt odd because the real glory is in painting those elaborate feathers). So far it has been fairly popular, especially with the kids who love coloring things. And it's something people can watch grow, which is a nice metaphor for libraries I suppose. I dunno, I'm just a kid who likes to color things.
I hope all you library people out there are having a fun summer reading! Hang in there, it's only for a few more weeks and then we can all have a nice break.
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