Harry Potter Book Night

Last Thursday 5th February Wallington Girls School celebrated Harry Potter Book Night.
After lunch I ran madly round the library trying to transform the space into Hogwarts.
As the library is at 'the top of the tower' the obvious choice was to turn the stairs into the Hogwarts corridors, and decorate it with the castle portraits:

And of course there is only one way to enter the library.

This year the Harry Potter book night theme was a night of spells. I decided we needed to create a Snape's postions display. Myself and several girls had lots of fun mixing water, milk, glitter, oil, and cake decorations into potions which we poured into empty jam jars and then labelled. As part of the party I invited students to create their own potions, there were some very imaginative entries! The winner was a potion which instantly cleaned your room and made your handwriting tidy. A close second was a potion which brought George back from the dead (sob, all the feels!)

I decorated the library with the names of the different Hogwarts houses, with a sprinkling of a few wanted posters here and there.

For the main event the girls were sorted into houses and then the quiz began. There were six rounds on spells, potions and enchantments, and a round of  killer individual questions where students had to guess who cast the spell and from which Potter book. The overall winners of the quiz were Ravenclaw, with Slytherin a close second. The event was a huge success and we just about had enough space to fit in all the girls in the library.

The Library that time forgot (How to transform a school library)

So hello, I'm the new librarian at Wallington High School for girls and I thought I'd resurrect this blog.
So you may have gathered the plan is to build a new library, a dream library. This is still going ahead but in the meantime I need to get the girls excited about the current library.

 Unfortunately the current library is a little unloved. The décor is shall we say a bit dated, but the biggest problem is the library is at 'the top of the tower'. That's right you have to climb several flights of stairs to get to the library!
As for the stock, well that's a whole other matter. The fiction has been read so many times much of it is falling apart, much of the non- fiction is outdated and there's been no new books for at least two years. So I've certainly got a challenge ahead of me.


A big help is that the girls are very enthusiastic about the library, and are surprising quite happy to take out a copy of The Hunger Games even if the first chapter is missing!
There are some avid readers who want to help transform the library and are full of ideas. So one of my first steps was to recruit pupil librarians. This was so popular that I now have a waiting list of girls who want to work in the library. This has been a great help as they are very willing to muck in and help transform the library.




So here are my steps to transforming a library:

1) Recruit help. I don't have a library assistant and so building a team of pupil librarians has been vital. SLA offer a really good free pack on how to set up a pupil librarian team, with different levels to attain to. (SLA Toolkit)
The reward for passing the first award, a shiny pupil librarian badge, has been a great incentive.




2) Weed. Never underestimate the power of weeding. I personally believe having fewer good condition books looks better then shelves crammed full of yellowing, sticky, broken books. If I went to my local library and saw books like this I would not bother looking at them, if no one else has taken them out for some time, I'm unlikely to find something I want to read. Shelves with no space are also discouraging because you have to fight to retrieve a book, where as a shelf with space you can move the books along to select your next read.
I started weeding by removing any books that were falling apart, that had been repaired so many times the best place for them now was in the bin. Next I removed any books that hadn't been issued in the past six years. Surprisingly there were quite a few of these, some of them even dating back to the 60's!
What to do with the weeded books is always a difficult decision. If you throw the books out I have known people before to hunt through the bins and question why they have been thrown out (my reply has normally been along the line of "the front cover is hanging off, there's several pages missing and there's a huge coffee stain on the outside. Would you read this?" Followed by "Well no, but someone might!") If the books were in reasonable good condition I used to box them up and send them to Betterworld Books. But I recently found out they no longer accept ex library books. A book sale is a good idea but if you can't encourage students to take the book out when it's free they are very unlikely to want to pay for it. So I have put a book display spinner outside and filled it with all the deleted books and put a box in the staff room offering free books. This seems to have worked quite successfully. Any books not taken after 4 weeks will then be recycled.

3) Tidy the shelves. After the mass weed I had created space on the shelves. I brought all the books to the front of the shelf as I think this looks more inviting. Then I choose one book from each shelf to display.

4) Buy new stock (on a budget). Young adult fiction is quite a fast moving industry, wrapped around popular culture and fashion. As with any fiction you get trends. First there was paranormal romance (Twilight), then dystopian worlds (Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze runner) and now I've seen a lot of end of the world/ Rapture fiction (The age of miracles, Vivian Versus the Apocalypse). At WHSG the most popular books at the moment seem to be the Geek Girl series and Pretty Little Liars. As I mentioned earlier, there had been no new books for at least at two years, so I needed to get some new books in and fast. The first thing I did was identify obvious stock gaps. There was no popular series' like Alex Rider and The Enemy. Then I started to create a list of the popular YA fiction published is the past few years. For this I looked at several websites like Good reads and looked at what book bloggers, Twitter and Instagram were talking about.
Next I needed to buy these on a budget. My first stop was charity shops, Oxfam books and the British Heart Foundation had a wonderful selection of books in really good condition at very reasonable prices. I also got some good deals from The Book People for whole sets and popular fiction.

5) Décor and displays. So my predecessor had created some lovely displays, so I felt these could be left for a bit whilst I sorted steps 1-4. As the library is due to move within the year there isn't much I could do with the décor apart from superficial changes. I contacted publishers and book shops and received a nice array of posters to decorate the library with (and cover holes in the wall).
I then started to create a display timetable, planning ahead which displays I'm going to put up and what I will need.

The library walls have seen better days

6) Events and Groups. So my last plan is to set up some groups (reading, creative writing etc) and organise some events. Once again I created a timetable, keeping a list of all book prizes, celebrations and relevant activities we might want to celebrate in the library.




Well that brings be nicely onto future plans. This week we will be celebrating Harry Potter Book Night and the girls are very excited. More on that soon....