Why I love my job, #6: A great space

Ms. Yingling Reads at www.msyinglingreads.blogspot.com is hosting a "Library Design Challenge" through which school librarians can share ideas about how to best use our physical spaces. This topic is really interesting to me. I love my library, but, like most schools, the space is limited and used for many purposes. I'm always looking for better ways to store collections, display books, arrange my work space, and make the whole library more inviting to students and staff.

I work in an independent school that has two campuses. I'm on the middle school/preschool campus, in a building constructed in 1999. The middle school library serves 240 students in grades 5-8 and houses about 8,000 titles. The preschool wing, serving 100 students, was added on as a kind of after-thought, and for a while their books were kept in rolling book bins in the middle school library and rolled down to their classrooms on Story Time days. But now the preschoolers come to the library for story time and their books are always here, still on the movable bins. There are about 1,000 titles for them and another 1,000 for the preschool teachers. (Grades 1-4 are housed about a mile from my campus, in the original school building.)

Here's a general view of one side of the library.




The other side is very similar, with another big window and half wall of shelving. One of the best features is the amount of light the room receives. Above the window you see here is an arched window and a tall peaked ceiling, so the room is light and airy and spacious, even though it is smaller than most school libraries. Another great feature are the desks, which can and are moved around daily in different configurations depending on what's happening. They can be put in clusters for a class, in rows for a test, in a big U-shape for a board meeting, pushed to the sides so the preschoolers can sit in a circle for story time, or even all taken out when we need to sit 60 kids on the floor to watch a video.

On the opposite side of the room there is more shelving and this nice reading area which backs up to the glass wall between the library and the computer lab. The glass door to the lab is often opened and I think of it as part of the library, even though it is manned by a Technology Instructor. The library itself has two computers for students and the lab has twenty-one.

I love the little reading area. It's new and the kids and staff love it, too. When I first saw this little nook it was filled with book trucks. I knew right off that it was perfect for a reading nook. I brought in two chairs and a little table from home and as soon as they were in, kids sat right down and started reading there! I took pictures and emailed them to the finance guy, and he found enough money in the furniture budget to buy these new pieces. The shelves behind the reading nook hold comic books, world record books, magazines, and other popular items, so this area is pretty busy.



One of the challenges is how to display books. There are almost no flat surfaces or wall space. To maximize the few flat surfaces I have, I bought the useful wire display racks you can see in this photo. I also use two shelves for book displays, which you also can see here.



I also have a book display at the circulation desk, which you see here.



One of the challenges of this space is that there was no separation between the staff work space and the rest of the library. Since I wanted that separation and since I had to store some of the collection on book carts, I used the carts as a "wall" between the two spaces. It's not pretty, but it works.



One dream I have is to some day replace these carts with low bookcases that open on both the public and the staff side and which match the rest of the gray shelving.

One last photo to share....the cherry red, highly versatile little book carts I bought last year. In this photo they are being used as a wall, but I frequently use them as "traveling libraries." They go into classrooms when teachers ask to borrow a range of books on a given subject, serve as "book mobiles" when I load them up with a variety of tempting material to roll into the halls and classrooms during the student's morning breaks, and come in handy for all kinds of other temporary and portable purposes. They are the "library on wheels" and I love having them.