Off the Shelf: More Change to Come for the Library
By Sharon Saye on March 13, 2019 from Off the Shelf
Change has been the theme for the last year with the new ceiling, lighting and flooring. The last of the lights in the children’s section were installed last week and our renovation project is now complete, but there are even more changes in store in the next few months.
As anyone who reads nonfiction has noticed, the shelves have empty spaces. We have been “weeding,” the library term for removing older, grubby, dated and unused books. As any librarian will tell you, people are far less interested in nonfiction books anymore. When you need to know how to plant a new gardening purchase, almost everyone googles the answer instead of borrowing a book. People who are traveling to Europe or Mexico used to borrow the latest Fodor guide for the best places to stay and the activities available, but now they google it. This has changed how collections are used and thus purchased.
We are currently holding a book sale in the hallway to help get rid of these books and it will continue into April, but we are also sending boxes of books to the Board of Education so that they can be used by students. We will be done with the nonfiction collection late this spring and are then moving on to the fiction.
With this space we are reconsidering the layout of the library. Hopefully, we can interfile the oversize books with their regular size partners, so users won’t have to look in two places. We plan to move the Young Adult collection to the front of the library and utilized their shelves to display brand new materials. Currently we have made shelving available for the new mysteries and science fiction, and we plan to re-shelve all the puzzles in one place.
This is a long process so change will be happening at your library in many ways, not just lighting and flooring. Please keep reading this column since we will be making changes soon to how our newest materials checkout. Soon DVD users will find more copies of top titles available as well as being able to place holds, but new movies will check out only for 7 days to decrease wait time.
Many of these changes have been discussed for years but have been held up by the renovations. Now we are free to make these changes that will streamline the behind-the-scenes processes as well as vastly expand the materials to which Bridgeporters have access. And we have new plans for our summer reading programs and STEM classes. So, keep reading, the future is looking very exciting.
