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Reading Challenge Nets WI School a $100K Library Makeover
Elementary schools in Racine, WI, were offered a tough challenge: read one million books during the 2011/2012 school year and win a $100,000 school library makeover. The town delivered, with 10,000...
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Chicago Building Its First Joint High School/Public Library from the Ground Up
Chicago’s taking the partnership between public and school libraries to the next level—it’s building its first public library as part of a school. The Back of the Yards branch of the Chicago Public...
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NYC Pols Urge State to Ban Sex Offenders from Library Children’s Rooms
NYPL’s 42 Street Children’s Center. New York Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Council Member Peter F. Vallone Jr. of Queens have asked the New York state legislature to pass a law barring sex...
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Baltimore Schools Receive $5 Million Library Upgrades
Hundreds of K-8 students in Baltimore, MD, will return this fall to 12 new school libraries equipped with Nooks, computers, and even a reading spot for mom and dad, thanks to a $5 million, four-year...
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Coming Soon: Fresh Paint!
Editor’s note: While lurking on one of the many listservs I subscribe to, I began to notice one poster’s funny, smart and insightful remarks and suggestions, and saw that many of her concerns focused...
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Fresh Paint: Works Well with Others
As most of you know, the public library is an information center providing resources that the community needs and wants. To know exactly what the community needs and wants the library relies on comment...
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Fresh Paint: Teen Volunteers—Priceless
Volunteers are a critical component of the public library organization. At my branch, nearly 20 percent of the shelving is completed by adult and teen volunteers. Each month teens log an average of 125...
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Fresh Paint: A New Building, a New Team, a New Me
My father is a Marine, so by the time I was eight I was quite adept at packing up my things. I vividly remember when we moved to Beaufort, SC. It was 1996, and it was the first time I ever took...
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Fresh Paint: We Have Arrived
As this article goes live, we are three—count ‘em!— three days away from opening the new Gum Spring Library. I’ve been here since mid-January, and I’m just beginning to realize that the expectations I...
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Fresh Paint: Doors Wide Open
Opening Day of Loudon County Library’s newest facility, Gum Spring Library, has come and gone. More than 6,500 people checked out 14,000 materials in just under five and a half hours, and we issued...
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We’re Ready for You! Planning for Summer Reading | Fresh Paint
We have ordered 2,500 Challenge Cards, scheduled 83 special events, and registered 100 teen volunteers in anticipation of Gum Spring library’s first Summer Reading Program (SRP)—In Your Backyard…and...
View ArticleGoing Green: Eco-friendly Schools
You can’t ignore the benefits of eco-friendly schools By Debra Lau Whelan, 9/1/2007 Maybe it’s the waterless urinals or the geothermal heating and cooling system buried 515 feet underground. Or perhaps...
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Divine Design: How to create the 21st-century school library of your dreams
By Margaret Sullivan, 4/1/2011 Things are changing. For starters, ebooks, apps, and the web are now a part of your students’ daily lives. So how do you determine the best way to turn your library space...
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Design to Learn By: Dynamic Early Learning Spaces in Public Libraries
Roger Mastroianni Photography A design revolution is reinventing the children’s room in public libraries and changing the way young children learn. The movement involves colorful spaces with mirrors,...
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Inflato Dumpsters Provide Mobile Lab Space | Design Innovation
You may be familiar with John Locke’s Department of Urban Betterment (DUB) for being behind the 2012 installation of mini-libraries in New York City telephone booths. Now DUB is at it again with the...
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Stockholm’s Tio Tretton Library Gives Tweens a Space of Their Own
Tio Tretton’s multi-layered design offers tweens places to read,craft, cook, use technology, or just hang out. At a unique library space in Stockholm, Sweden, the only patrons who can come through the...
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Fresh Paint: Moving Forward, Looking Back
When I first introduced myself and the Gum Spring Library to you all last September, our opening team was less than five months away from opening the doors to Loudoun County’s eighth library branch. In...
View ArticleCafé Society: Do school libraries need a double shot of espresso?
Do school libraries need a double shot of espresso? When Jim Chadwell, the former principal of Northwest High School in Texas, renovated his media center four years ago, he had two things in mind:...
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Detroit School Library Named After Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen DeGeneres is a talk show host, comedian, actress, and now the namesake of a school library. The Detroit Achievement Academy in Michigan announced that it is naming its library in DeGeneres’s...
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