I’ve recently done two displays for our department.
The 398.2’s are always buried in the non-fiction, and it’s generally not a place patrons frequently think of for storybooks. This display helps highlight books and get them in the hands of kids. Plus, castles are ultra cool. You could even load up your display with books about medieval life, etc.
This could be a good group art project for some older kids, cutting out the needed shapes and painting everything gray. The bulk of the castle is just cardboard boxes and cardboard cut out taped to the table around it’s sides. Towers are empty oatmeal containers and the flagpoles and used paper towel rolls. The clouds cover the table legs, making the whole thing seem like it’s floating. They just make it nicer too, since otherwise, it’d be very obvious that it’s just a castle on a table.
Leave plenty of dead space in your castle design for the books! And it’s very important that you make the castle extra tall. It’s it’s too short you’ll put books on it and won’t be able to see the castle!
The next display is of dinosaur bones.
For a different picture of the dinosaurs back, click here.
Not quite the same idea, since most of your young patrons can probably find the dinosaurs books blindfolded. But this definetly highlights and helps circulate some of those Palaeozoic and Triassic texts.
Josh Jubinsky
Hi Josh, love your display. I’ve been pulling out various jnf collections and displaying them in the childrens area with the dewey no. in an A4 landscape holder. Much of that collection is buried and doesn’t get borrowed as much as it should. I’d trick it up with some props, but our library is a hotbed of thieves unfortunately, so I might try your approach. We keep out 398’s separately in the childrens collection. Each week I display a selection from the ‘picturebooks for older readers’ as well, and that keeps that turning over. I work in a large public library service in Melbourne, Australia.
This is a fabulous display! Tell me more about the dinosaur cut-out! Thanks.