A Look Back at 2014 in the Library

Now that it's 2015, here's a look back at some of the programs we offered from September to December of 2014:

For Banned Books week this year (September 21-27, 2014), we covered banned books with brown paper and wrote the reasons why each book was challenged and/or banned on the covers, hoping that the often ridiculous challenges ("too sad" written on the cover of The Fault in Our Stars, for example) would pique the curiosity of our students.  And it did!

We also borrowed the art department's button maker.  Oh, the button maker.  Why did we never know before how completely satisfying it is to make buttons?

We got completely carried away with the button maker, expanding from "I read banned books" buttons to a slew of other book-themed buttons.  We still haven't given the button maker back.

Buttons celebrating TFiOS, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, & Game of Thrones.

At the very beginning of the year, we decided we wanted more library art--simple, literary-themed, inexpensive posters to add a splash of color to the sleek white walls of our updated library.  Of course, we went with Litographs.

Since the renovation linked the library on the second floor with the science wing on the first floor, we chose a Litograph print of Darwin's The Origin of Species to display over the Carlson Commons.  The reading nook in the back of the library, tucked away behind the stacks, features a Moby Dick Litograph.  

The best part of our new Litograph artwork is when students who have walked past the posters dozens of times suddenly realize that the image is made up of text and they stop in their tracks, completely awed and amazed, to read a few sentences.  :)

We also ordered new artwork for the ends of our bookshelves.  These are very simple posters, designed in Photoshop and ordered online from a nearby Kinko's.  We selected two popular phrases as our text for these posters:  "Don't forget to be awesome" from nerdfighters John and Hank Green's VlogBrothers YouTube channel, and "May the odds be ever in your favor" from Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games.  Our third poster is an old WPA advertisement for public libraries, dating from the 1940s and available for free download online from the Library of Congress.

What a beautiful library!

A few choice book displays (I often use the free Pic Collage app to make simple photo collages, the better to show and promote our display shelves):

Ebola display!  Books about plagues and diseases.

Paper mustaches for books for our Movember display.

Read a mustache.

Dystopia display for the new Mockingjay movie.

"Gamers and Hackers" display

We also celebrated Jane Austen's birthday and the first even Annual Jane Austen Day (as declared by the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England) on December 16th.  We have a Jane Austen action figure, so the obvious thing to do was to create a diorama in our office:

Jane celebrates her 239th birthday with a dinosaur, President Buchanan, a My
Little Pony, Harry Potter, Edgar Allen Poe, and a zombie from "The Walking Dead."

And today we are live-streaming the free climbers in Yosemite National Park as they near the summit of El Capitan: