A couple of days ago, someone on the US-based YALSA-BK listserv (yes, listservs are still active in many arenas -- even though other social media tools have arisen) suggested we crowd-source (amongst ourselves) lists of titles for MS/HS "themed" book talks.
I'd been wanting to promote such lists to my students, but struggled to find a way to make the production process scaleable. How to keep track of the books I booktalked as a themed grouping and continually promote the list.
A few years back The ReadAdventurer blog published some "walls of books" -- see "140+ Books for the Boys of YA", "120 YA books from the UK", "110+ Australian YA books", and "A Metric Ton of Short YA Books" -- which I loved. Then there were the online readers advisory tools like the NPR Book Concierge, which also shared booklists using book covers in a very visual way. I wanted to find some vehicle to do the same thing -- generate lists based on themes -- but be visible in the library all the time.
Then I found +Rebecca Dunham (blog - Lunashee's Lunacy) and her YA themed posters (freely given away under Creative Commons). Her posters inspired us to create our own, by providing some initial themes and a basic style to copy. As we didn't have all the books on her posters, we simply modified the selection of titles to match our collection.
Luckily I have a teacher, Mairin Raisdana, who works part-time in our library as our design and production queen; I just come up with the themes and titles I want to potentially booktalk.
Here is a Google Plus photo album of our posters, so far:
An important feature of every poster is both a QR code and a shortened URL (goo.gl or bit.ly) which takes viewers directly to the booklist in our Follett Destiny catalog. So people can find out whether any copies are currently available in the library or not. A majority of our high school students do have smart phones, but I also have a number of iPads that can be used as mobile OPACS and QR code scanners.
By linking to the catalog -- to a Resource List or to a search for particular key words or subject headings -- I can booktalk the books shown on the poster, but know there is a ready list of those books plus more -- to put into students' hands. (Nothing worse than booktalking a stack of titles and not having enough to go around....)
The poster images are also available in our Libguides -- on a High School Reading Recommendations guide -- linking back to our catalog.
Physical copies of the poster are very important. There's just so much in our libraries that is hidden online (or in our heads).
In the library itself wall space is limited. So instead, we've got a circular rack of A3 (11" x 17") posters in plastic -- allowing patrons to browse the posters, like they would clothing. The photos of our poster carousel are at the end of the slideshow above. I've thought eventually I could get dividers on the rack, the equivalent of "Size 8", "Size 10", etc. -- "Teacher Favorites", "HS Genres", "MS Genres", "Fiction", "Nonfiction", etc.
Note that the hanging posters are not laminated. (Bad for the environment....) Instead they are put in re-usable stiff plastic sleeves. This allows for easy updating of the display. In the slideshow I include some pictures of what I buy here in Singapore, where they are called "card cases" or "hard cases". I'm not sure what they would be called elsewhere ("document cases"?). The coat/skirt hangers are from IKEA.
Our school has a big Epson printer -- that allows us to produce posters that are 1.x meters (3 feet+) in size. So we can also put big-scale posters in hallways and on teachers' walls. (As we encourage all teachers to give us their list of favorite books -- from which we create a poster for them. See this previous blog post.)
I'd been wanting to promote such lists to my students, but struggled to find a way to make the production process scaleable. How to keep track of the books I booktalked as a themed grouping and continually promote the list.
A few years back The ReadAdventurer blog published some "walls of books" -- see "140+ Books for the Boys of YA", "120 YA books from the UK", "110+ Australian YA books", and "A Metric Ton of Short YA Books" -- which I loved. Then there were the online readers advisory tools like the NPR Book Concierge, which also shared booklists using book covers in a very visual way. I wanted to find some vehicle to do the same thing -- generate lists based on themes -- but be visible in the library all the time.
Then I found +Rebecca Dunham (blog - Lunashee's Lunacy) and her YA themed posters (freely given away under Creative Commons). Her posters inspired us to create our own, by providing some initial themes and a basic style to copy. As we didn't have all the books on her posters, we simply modified the selection of titles to match our collection.
Luckily I have a teacher, Mairin Raisdana, who works part-time in our library as our design and production queen; I just come up with the themes and titles I want to potentially booktalk.
Here is a Google Plus photo album of our posters, so far:
An important feature of every poster is both a QR code and a shortened URL (goo.gl or bit.ly) which takes viewers directly to the booklist in our Follett Destiny catalog. So people can find out whether any copies are currently available in the library or not. A majority of our high school students do have smart phones, but I also have a number of iPads that can be used as mobile OPACS and QR code scanners.
By linking to the catalog -- to a Resource List or to a search for particular key words or subject headings -- I can booktalk the books shown on the poster, but know there is a ready list of those books plus more -- to put into students' hands. (Nothing worse than booktalking a stack of titles and not having enough to go around....)
The poster images are also available in our Libguides -- on a High School Reading Recommendations guide -- linking back to our catalog.
Physical copies of the poster are very important. There's just so much in our libraries that is hidden online (or in our heads).
In the library itself wall space is limited. So instead, we've got a circular rack of A3 (11" x 17") posters in plastic -- allowing patrons to browse the posters, like they would clothing. The photos of our poster carousel are at the end of the slideshow above. I've thought eventually I could get dividers on the rack, the equivalent of "Size 8", "Size 10", etc. -- "Teacher Favorites", "HS Genres", "MS Genres", "Fiction", "Nonfiction", etc.
Note that the hanging posters are not laminated. (Bad for the environment....) Instead they are put in re-usable stiff plastic sleeves. This allows for easy updating of the display. In the slideshow I include some pictures of what I buy here in Singapore, where they are called "card cases" or "hard cases". I'm not sure what they would be called elsewhere ("document cases"?). The coat/skirt hangers are from IKEA.
Our school has a big Epson printer -- that allows us to produce posters that are 1.x meters (3 feet+) in size. So we can also put big-scale posters in hallways and on teachers' walls. (As we encourage all teachers to give us their list of favorite books -- from which we create a poster for them. See this previous blog post.)