Library Lovers Month - Passive Program

February is Library Lovers Month, which I celebrated with this surprisingly popular passive program (or shameless ploy to solicit compliments, you decide 😉).

I had a great idea for a passive program, inspired by a couple of things. One day some time ago, one of our young regulars handed me several pieces of scrap paper covered with lines of cursive-like scribbles which his mother translated for me as saying "I love the library" and "I love the librarian", which I of course saved with all my other treasures kids have given me:

Then, some time later, someone had put out a box of stuff at work they wanted to get rid of, and one of the items in it was a small cardboard mailbox covered with hearts like kids use for Valentine's day, and that got me to thinking about how great it would be to set up a station for kids to write love letters to the library telling us what they love about it in February. 

I remembered we had a toy mailbox tucked away, so I got it out and added a few stickers to jazz it up and look more Valentine-y. Then I made some stationary and set it all out on a table with some pencils, a few crayons, and a sign inviting them to write or draw to tell us what they love about the library.

The response was overwhelming! Our young patrons REALLY love the library, and REALLY wanted to tell us why! I set it up on Saturday afternoon, and by the end of Sunday afternoon there were already just shy of 50 responses. In fact, they wanted to tell us why they loved the library so much, that when the stationary temporarily ran out, they got creative in finding their own paper, using receipts, coloring pages, and scrap paper.

I was amazed at the response, and how excited some of the kids were to do it. I think the mailbox really helped sell it, as we've never had such a large response to any similar activities before. I had originally just planned on putting them up in the department, but there were so many our floor manager suggested I put them up on the humongous 20" corkboard they just had installed in the main library. So I started with this:

Then after a week it looked like this:

And I still had quite a few left over that I didn't have room for. I had originally intended to leave it up for at least a couple of weeks, but ended up stopping after 8 days and 200+ responses, because I figured at that point we were getting a lot of multiple responses from the same kids and wasting paper.

I loved emptying the mailbox and reading the notes each day to see what they had to say. Some notes were written by the children themselves, some were written by the parents, some chose to draw a picture, and some just scribbled. 

Of course many of them mentioned all the books, some even mentioning specific types, titles, or series, and the fact they could chose their own; but some of the other things they loved were the trains, dramatic play area, and other toys; computers, coloring sheets, dry erase tables, scavenger hunts, storytime, playing with friends, making new friends, reading with mom/dad, programs, games, stickers, being able to place holds, being able to check out more than 2 books (one was very indignant that even as a 5th grader, their school library only lets them check out 2 books), and movies. 

But what I loved seeing the most was how many mentioned the friendly, nice, and helpful people that work at the library and help them find things. The two full-time children's librarians even got mentioned by name, but I claim credit for the one that mentioned "experiments" since I do most of the STEM programs.

Here are some particular quotes that stood out:

" [I love to] do the find at the library" (referring to the scavenger hunts)

"If we didn't have books we wouldn't know anything."

"The librarians are all really nice, and it just rocks in general."

"I remember playing [here] at like 5 [years old]!" (said by 10 year old, as though that was such a long time ago)

"I have [been] goen [sic] to the library my entier [sic] life!" 

Of course when you do something like this you always run the risk of someone being a jerk and saying something nasty, and we did get a couple of those, but considering it was only 3 out of 200+, I think that was pretty good.

Of course I can't close without saying some of the things I love about my library. I have to say I truly enjoy being at work most of the time. We have a wonderfully diverse community with a strong reading culture that is very supportive and appreciative and I love building relationships with our patrons, I have great coworkers and we all get along well and complement each other, I am able to do a little bit of everything and put all my varied interests and experiences to use, and I'm proud of the large and diverse collection we have and all the programs and services we offer.

I 💗My Library!

Election Day At The Library

Election Day in one word........Exhausting!

Election Day proved to be a very long and very busy day. I am currently part-time, so I usually just work a 4-hour shift, but since one of my colleagues was away at a conference I also worked the morning shift and covered her toddler storytime.

The day started off fairly quiet for the first hour, but then as it got closer to storytime families started pouring in, and with school being out for election day, they also had older siblings in tow. I had a pretty big crowd for storytime, and it went pretty well, especially considering we had to have it out in the open area of the department rather the meeting room. Unfortunately, we do not have a dedicated program room, and the meeting room was being used for voting as the library is a polling place. Having storytime out in the open means there is a lot more noise from older kids playing around us, and a whole lot more distractions. But despite that all that, I think it went okay.

With it being a storytime day, school being out, and the library being a polling place, I knew we would have lots of families with kids in and out all day, so I did a couple of special election-related things. First, I set up a display with election-related books. I pulled both fiction and non-fiction, including books that had anything to do with elections, voting, voting rights, and a few general government books to fill in if we started running out. Some of the books were from the election picture book bibliography I put together a few years ago, but I also included books for older readers and chapter books.

Then I set up a simple little "election" for the kids to vote on. We did this last year with a more complicated ballot that had three different races to vote on, to more closely mirror the real election, but the kids found it very confusing and most just couldn't understand the concept of voting on three different things. So this year I kept it very simple, and instead of labeling it as a race for a government office, I just put it as "pick your favorite character". 

Rather than picking a random assortment of fictional characters, I thought it would be easier to narrow it to one type of character. My first thought was to pick your favorite cat or dog character, because there are several of either, but then I've seen that done several times, and realized there were probably more well-known pig characters than either cat or dog, so I went with favorite pig character. 

[Only later did it occur to me that people might think I was making some kind of commentary about the real-life candidates, but I swear that was not my intent at all!]

I made up a simple ballot with 6 characters, including name and image, with instructions to mark their favorite and then put the ballot in the ballot box, and set up a polling area with a flyer, ballot box, ballots, and pencils.

I don't think the younger kids participated as much as I would have liked, since they didn't quite understand the whole thing as well as the older kids, and couldn't really do it by themselves. I meant to announce it in storytime, but of course forgot. Though I did try to point it out to as many people as possible, it seemed that many just didn't want to bother. However, I did get fairly good participation from the older kids who could read and do it on their own. I even had several stop playing and rush to get in line to vote just before 5:00pm when I announced the poll was about to close.

The results were a bit surprising, and I think reflect the greater participation by the school-aged kids. We had a total of 56 votes, with a narrow margin of only ONE vote separating the top two candidates:

• Piggie (from the Elephant & Piggie series by Mo Willems) - 18 votes, 32%
• Wilbur (from Charlotte's Web by E. B. White) - 17 votes, 30%
• Peppa Pig (from the British children's TV show) - 9 votes, 16%
• Mercy Watson (from the series by Kate Dicamillo) - 8 votes, 14%
• Olivia (from the Olivia series by Ian Falconer) - 4 votes, 7%
• Babe (from the book by Dick King-Smith) - 0 votes 😞

I really didn't expect Wilbur to get that many votes, and thought Peppa would get more. I made a flyer with the results to post in the department for the kids to see.

Though there was a bit of a lull in the middle of the day, it got super busy later in the afternoon, and I was run ragged with helping people find things, checkout, answering questions, etc. I was getting a bit stressed because I could see that toys were getting everywhere, display and face-outs were being emptied, shelves were a wreck, rejected books lying everywhere, but I was so busy assisting customers, I just didn't have a spare minute to do any straightening up like I normally do, since I was on my own due to being short-staffed with one colleague at a conference,  another unexpectedly having to take off due to a family emergency.

I finally got someone from circ to cover so I could take a quick break, but even then it still took me 10 minutes to get away once she came back because people kept asking me for help. Finally, I got a quick break, and after that things slowed down enough that I had a chance to quickly do some cleaning up in the last few minutes before I left. I always try to straighten up periodically during my shift, and especially at the end because I don't like to leave a mess for the next person to have to deal with. All in all, it was a good day; just very, very busy!

After work I went straight home, grabbed a quick bite, and took a hot shower and a well-deserved nap!