Library Display: April 2014

Our campus has a huge Earth Day event every year.  It's basically a street fair with a farmer's market, recycling, free food, live music... party!

This year we decided to do our April display to go along with that theme:

You can see what we did there, right?  That shamrock from last month suddenly became a tree!  I brought in some flower pots from home and made "book flowers" with info on them.  And of course we had to have a copy of The Lorax!  Compared to others, this was a really easy one to do.  (Which is a good thing, since April is such a busy month!)  Books on the earth and recycling and gardening and conservation added color and interest to the shelves.

I got a bit whimsical with the dry erase board, but hey - that never costs anything so I can be as creative (or as boring!) as I'd like to be, right?

Finally, we dressed up the front window with a few flower cutouts and some leaves we made for a past display.  (Yes, we keep everything... who knows when you might need it and don't have time to make it again?)

Library Display: March 2014

We went all St. Patrick's Day this year, and picked up some cheap decorations at the party store (because you can never have enough glittery shamrocks, am-I-right?

We also bought rolls of crepe streamers to make the rainbow.  It was a little tricky making them line up, but it added a cool effect down to the pot of gold (black poster board and a printout of a pile of gold coins taped to the top!)  We made the big shamrock with bulletin board paper.

The books were all about the Irish - histories, authors, anything we could remotely tie in.

Then we did the front window with eBooks:

(and more glittery shamrocks!)

Finally, the most difficult part of the whole thing was the dry erase board.  

Nope, the lettering is not a stencil.  It's all done freehand.  I actually cleaned up the knot a bit after I took the pic because some of the lines didn't meet up right.  (Me, OCD?  Not on your life, she said, straightening the pencils in the cup holder.)

Library Display, February 2014

Oh, February, you busy, busy month.  How can you pick one theme for February?  There is just TOO much going on! Black History Month, Valentine's Day, the Olympics, Presidents' Day... just to name a few.

Well...

we gave up and decided to do them ALL!

Nothing fancy here, though we did give the color printer  a workout.  We decided to do a small banner for each event, and coordinate the main "logo" with our top banner.  We removed a shelf to make room, and... voila!

 

Our front window had the same tag line, and as always we pulled eBook covers from Overdrive and our Ebrary / Ebsco databases.

 

Yeah, even our sign was boring this month.  March will be better, I promise!!! 

Library Display, January 2014

So I live in Georgia.  Despite all the polar vortex visits this January, we actually don't get much snow.  So we decided on a snowflake theme for January...  ::brrrrr::

We're hoping folks will get the idea that we have a bunch of different genres, not just the dry dusty stuff for class.  (That's what the little shelf talkers are - the genre.)


And because it's cold and showy, we kept our Christmas fireplace and added a snowy window (recycling some of the black poster board from our haunted house...)

Our window keeps the theme

And of course I love to play with the dry erase markers!

Nuts and bolts:

Not nearly as interesting as the October display, but at least we got to make a bunch of paper snowflakes using paper we already had.  Win!!

September Library Display, 2013

Banned books week!

I give my library associate FULL credit for this one.  She did the signage, and she came up with the design.

"Celebrate the Freedom to Read"

 What's more iconic to Banned Books Week than burning books?

And my favorite Ray Bradbury quote....

Nuts and Bolts:

I brought in a few branches from my back yard, and we crumpled up some packing paper.  Easy peasy.  We cut the flames out of colored paper (not so easy peasy .... actually very annoying!)  But the smart thing we did was be very sparing in our use of tape so we could make sure we can reuse stuff like that.

We displayed books from the banned and challenged lists, and really got students talking about it.  Yay!

October Library Display, 2013

This is my most favorite display EVER.  I don't know that we'll ever top it!

"Books that go BUMP in the Night"

Yes, indeedy.  We turned our shelves into a haunted house!!
 

And the front window was spooky as well.

Of course, I couldn't resist doing something fun on the dry erase board!

Nuts and bolts:

The house was hard.  I used an old cardboard box, LOTS of tape, and a good bit of under-my-breath muttering to make the roof.  It looks fine on the front side, but if you look at the back you'll see all the bits and fakery I did to make it come out right.  I spent several hours off and on working on it (yes, I am nuts).

For the black part I bought four sheets of black poster board.  I wanted it to be stiff, not floppy like bulletin board paper.  Again, I just cut strips and pieced it together based on a sketch I did beforehand.  We used yellow as a background to make it look like light shining out windows.  I was going to add doors to the bottom shelf, but I eventually a) ran out of time, and b) decided it would get in the way of the computer to the left.

The books are all books about ghosts and ghost stories.  We even have a few about famous college ghosts!  (And of course the obligatory "13 Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey".)

November Library Display, 2013

We went historical for November.  We dug up books about the early colonization of America, books about Native Americans, and tossed in some kids' books on Thanksgiving to make it bright.

 "Happy Thanksgiving"

 So we went with the fall theme, and created a tree.  (Well, sort of... if you squint just right...)  Someone brought in a bag of decorative winter squash a few days later and filled the bottom shelf with those (but slacker that I am I didn't get a pic of that.)

Our front window became a cornucopia, spilling out fruit, veggies, and ebooks!

And because I could, I drew a cornucopia on the board as well.

Nuts and Bolts:

The tree was a pain.  I didn't want to waste a lot of paper, so I pieced together strips and tried to cover the seams with leaves we cut out of colored copy paper.  We did the same thing for the cornucopia in the window.  We found simple clipart that we printed large onto colored paper, and used gel pens to add extra color.