National Library Week

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What is National Library Week? 

This is an annual celebration highlighting the valuable role libraries, librarians, and library workers play in transforming lives and strengthening our communities. ALA picks an honorary chair and has posters and social media graphics that everyone can use. 

Our library system wanted to do something speical to promote this week and a speical event called Literary Voices happening in Oklahoma. I made a passive program in the children's area that I called "Guess How Many Books are in the Children's Section". 


What I did to prepare

I did not count all the books! The system we use for inventory tells us how many books are in the collection. I just needed to run a report for each section such as Tween Fiction and Tween Non-fiction. 

We have a white board that we use for passive programming that worked great for this. I put out some small sticky notes and pencils for guests to write on. The board said "How many items are in the children's section? Take a guess!" Below that I wrote out the names of all the sections that they should think about such as Tween. I used our Cricut to cut out the letters and images and used to tape to stick them to the board.

At the end of Library Week, I reviled the answer and kept the guess that were close on the board. We have over 22,000 items on our shelves! I was fun to have kids come up to us and ask if there were 1000 books. We had about 60 people write down guesses. 


Takeaway

This is an easy passive event that you can put up year round. The hardest part for me was taping everything down then removing said tape. Overall, it was fun and I think I'll do similar passive things in the future. 




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