Stuck in a Rut

I am going to make an appointment with one of our Deacons week after next to discuss the library. I just had four large bags of books donated and I sat there today without the courage to process any of them into the library. I'm sure they are all fine books, the majority being in the Christian Living category. The problem is, our library has a very large wall full of those types of books which rarely get checked out. Maybe 10 a year, by mostly one person. They are well written, almost the classics of their type, so I have a hard time finding the heart to confine these new books to the wall. I feel like I want to go donate them somewhere. I've tried contests, I put a list in our bulletin of the new books in the library, I have displays, I rotate out older books so the books look fresh, though I refuse to get rid of those which I know are "classic" and great books.

Most of my readers (about 10 people in a church of 70 families) choose the fiction books, and usually the romance/historical ones.

So I'm meeting with the Deacon to put my woes before him. I just feel guilty spending the limited resources we have on new books which are rarely, if ever going to be read. Do I give up and only buy fiction? The children rarely check out books, even though I spent a lot of time getting them some of the best up to date Christian fiction for children available. Same with the teens. I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle.

Any of you feel this way?

This past year, our Library Committee worked particularly hard to get some fresh titles for young adults and older children. A few adults have checked a couple out, but none were checked out by young people. Our library does not get the use it deserves, and I have certainly wondered if it is worth the effort. Recently, a new attender told me how inspiring he had found a book on display in the library. His comment caused several people to come into the library that day and look around. A few books got checked out. That was inspiring to me. I realized that we are making an investment in the future, not the present. When a church is as small as we are, a new family with several children can make a big impact. I want to be ready when that family arrives. My new attitude is "build it and they will come."

WARM - Thank you, that is hopeful!

I frequently find "donations" of books in the return basket of our library. No note who is donating them. Then I have to page through them to see if the content is appropriate for our collection. What I feel is inappropriate, a duplicate of something already in the library, an older out-of-date book, or simply a book on a topic I already have 100 sections for, gets donated to our local AAUW book drive. Surprisingly, adult fiction is about 10 percent of our collection. Mostly older people read those. One of our more popular sections is music where people can check out CDs featuring hymns from our hymnals (some contemporary) and also sheet music. Our largest section is peace and justice and features books from our denomination. I do feel frustrated in the lack of circulation with our teens, so I've added religiously oriented DVDs and also listed websites where they can download religious books for their iPods. I continue to buy new books because, as one commented above, one person will come in and rave about a book which draws others in. Good luck with it!

I can see how hard it is for a church library to flourish in an English speaking environment as there is so much else to read (gigantic sunday papers, etc.) We, fortunately don't have that problem as we are the only English language, Christian library in town and altho' circulation isn't as much as I think it should be, we are thriving. Just finished the children's summer reading program and it was a blessing. I get a chance to spend quality time with the children and find out what their tastes are. We spend a lot of time spiffing up the library so it looks dynamic and of course read all the new books so we can encourage people to read. Cds are a great resource. We'd like to add DVDs but the US ones don't work too well in Europe, and buying them in the UK is prohibitive. Don't give up. I think the best attitude is to be prepared for the booklovers and they will appear.

Thank you misskate, is your library in a church? How do you work your summer reading program? Do people come in during the week?

I know a big part of my problem is probably me. I'm not very energetic about anything right now.

I met with an elder and we discussed some options. I am to get up in front of the congregation once a month (gulp!) and tell them about some of the great books we have for various ages. We thought I could work it to the theme of his message that week and we would put the books which relate to that theme in the foyer. The first one is baptism, and it's next week.

We also discussed whether or not LibraryThing or Shelfari could be helpful. I recommended LibraryThing, because even though there is a yearly fee, the entering of books is so much better here. Easier to edit to your version, etc. Shelfari is attractive on the surface, but a bear to do any serious book cataloging on. Of course this would mean a computer in the library, so I'm also supposed to look into the cost of a basic computer whose only function would be internet research. I thought about a laptop, which I could bring home, but it would be much more expensive.

I have maintained our small church library for severl years now. I would really like to see it used more but people just don't ssem to have a lot of time to read.

That being said I do try to write an article for the churches monthly newsletter about the library and I have a section where I display the most recently accquired books. But perhaps the thimg that people check out most is DVD's. So I find if I can be in the library when they are checking out a DVD, I often suggest a book that I think they might like and they usually check it out also. I have even gone so far as to ask people if they have read such and such a book and then notice they often check it out. But I still do not know how to get Jr and Senior High students interested in the library.

I have been very encouraged as of late in that I have had some folks from the town who are not members of our church check out some books. They are usually in the building because we host the local scouting groups.

I do not know how long you have been doing this but don't get discouraged......you are doing a good thing.

HUMC - Thank you. I gave my spiel in front of the church last Sunday, had the cart ready, got lots of compliments and encouragement from people, but no one checked out a book. Sigh. I suppose we must keep trying and get people used to thinking about books.

I have at least one person a Sunday peek in at the books, but they won't step over the threshold. They run like a scared chicken if I smile and greet them. Honestly, maybe I need a makeover? We've discussed a remodel, taking out the wall in the hall and putting a couch there instead, combining the room next door and making a place to serve coffee, along with adding a cafe table and stools. It sounds like a great idea, but I doubt if it is in our church's main budget concerns, so it probably won't happen in my lifetime. :)

Update - The church is buying me a computer, letting me set up an account here. Last Sunday I did a bulletin insert with colored pictures and descriptions of books to help integrate faith into your education in the areas of philosophy, history and science, and actually had some people check out some books! Once a month, I'm decorating the library cart and putting it in the foyer with a special selection of books. Hoping this will build momentum.

So what I really want to do in October is, put a giant Frankenstein's monster by the cart with a sign which says: Aren't you glad you are made in the image of God, and not man? Then another sign with an appropriate Bible verse.

I doubt if I will be allowed to do that, but if not, I'm going to do it on my front porch. :) Most people would probably not realize that Frankenstein has nothing to do with Halloween. :)

I love the idea of reminding people through use of Frankenstein. Could lead to some good conversations about the overall issue of Halloween as well!

#10 - Thanks, of course the problem is not giving offense to anyone, and there is always such a wide variety of folks at church. Sigh. I'm still gonna ask, but I'll understand if the leadership doesn't want to go there. :)

I got permission for the Frankenstein thing! Now I have to go find a Frankie costume. :( I went to Walmart and they had all sorts of stitched up critters, but nothing that said "Frankenstein!" The message that Sunday is on stewardship, so I need to find some books to fit in with the themes. I'm going to use the verse from Eph. 2:10 on the monster.

This sort of fits the theme..of getting people to use the library. I was wondering if any of you have had any luck with audio books? I noticed that Rob Bell's newest book "Jesus Wants to Save Chrisiians " is also availabe as an audio book. I have had several people check out the Message that is on CD's. Am thinking of just buying the audio book and not the actual book!

Good luck with the Frankenstein costume...it would certianly get my attention and as a church librarian it might just be nice to get noticed once in awhile!

#13 - Yes, one does feel invisible at times. :)

I have the audio cassettes which Focus on the Family produced for the Narnia series and the life of Deidrich Bonhoffer (sorry if I spelled that wrong), as well as the Bible on cassette. They seem to be popular in fits and spurts, but I'm afraid that most people don't have cassette players anymore! People like them when they go on driving vacations with their kids. I think you would need to talk them up though so folks are aware of how great audio books can be.

Well, an update. I couldn't find a Frankenstein mask anywhere, and am too busy to craft one, so I guess that idea is on hold. I'll go with the harvest theme after all.

Hmmm. Hadn't thought about people not having casette players anymore. I'm wondering if it would be worth it for the library to buy one and rent it out.

We had a walkman to loan, but it never got used and the earpieces became yucky, so I got rid of it. :)

My latest idea, which seems to be a big hit, is a Read-A-Thon. People sign up to participate, then find others to sponsor them for at least a penny a page. This will go through the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and raise money for Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL. I have 20 readers participating so far, with over 50 books checked out. Six of the readers are adults, which pleased me, but the fact that fourteen children are excited about checking out books from our church library thrills me!

MrsLee - the Read-A-Thon sounds like a great idea! What kind of sheets do the sponsors sign up on? How did you promote it?

I made a sheet for each child/reader to sign folks up on. The readers are responsible for getting the donations when the time is up, I'm not going to be heavy handed about it, the sponsors either will or won't come through. The sheet I made had spaces for sponsor's name, amount pledged per page, total pages read, total amount due from each sponsor and total amount turned in.

I made bookmarks to be taken with each book. The reader fills in the title of the book, the amount of pages, sign their name that they read it, and if they are a child, the parent signs their name as well. We count it if the parent reads it to the child, or if the child reads it to a sibling as well, but every book only counts once for each person. The bookmark gets turned in with the book and only those pages count. I'll collect the sponsor pages at the end and tally up the totals for each.

For promotion, I went to the Sunday School classes with boxes of age appropriate books and told them a bit about Wycliffe and SIL first. I had the children try to read a Spanish Bible, then tell me the meaning of what they read. I then explained about our heart language, the language our mother's speak to us, and that many do not have God's word in their heart language. I named the Read-A-Thon "God Speaks to the Heart." I am awarding a prize or two in each S.S. class based on pages read, and maybe amount earned. The pastor also had me speak in front of the congregation during our announcements and explain what we are doing. Now we put reminders in the bulletin, and I'm going to make a bulletin board for the hallway with the participants picture and what they've read, and the total amount of pages read so far, on a thermometer.

The problem with doing it at this time of year, is that there are many calls on people's charity right now. Summer vacation may be a better time to do it, but then you are dealing with the fact that so many people are traveling.

MrsLee,

Have you tried contacting other church libraries to see how they get circulation. There are a number of church libraries on LT. Some church libraries show up on my most similar list, one of them is Grace Church in Paducah, KY. Their profile page is: http://www.librarything.com/profile/gracechurch . I wonder whether they have any wisdom on how to promote use.

Another church library, St. John's Epis Ch, Beverly MA, had a group of LTers, including Tim Spalding, I think, go to their library on a Saturday and entered into LT some 1,600 books from their library. I think this was a fun occasion. The profile for this library is: http://www.librarything.com/profile/StJohnsBeverlyFarms and I wonder how ell their library is used. Perhaps the Church library members of LT should get together. This effort was reported on the LT blog (upper right tab), and is the second entry at this point (below the stuff on Common Knowledge).

Neither my regular church in New York City, nor my alternate on Long Island have church libraries. However, my old library in Indianapolis, IN, had a nice library -- but they aren't on LT.

Thanks for the idea vpfluke. I have looked at a few libraries here, but not left notes. I was kinda hoping they would be members of this group. :) We're having connection issues at church for the last 2 weeks, so I haven't been able to be online at church. Hope that will be fixed tomorrow.

Love your Read-A-Thon idea! I'm going to ask members who have the equipment if they will convert our casettes to CD. Our Audiovisual material has been popular.

#23 - I never thought about converting them. Does the sound quality come out O.K.? I suppose it wouldn't matter terribly as long as they are not music?

A couple of years back I tried to record all the record albums I loved onto cassette. I thought I was doing fine, got rid of the albums, then tried to play the cassettes and discovered the sound hadn't worked well. That's when I decided to just give up on cassettes and buy CDs of my beloved artists. :) Technology and I have a very complicated relationship.

Hmm. I don't know how the quality will turn out. Copying from one CD to another has worked very well. But cassette to CD... don't know. I'll let you know if I find someone to do it.

We have a large church library (about 7000 items) and it gets a fair bit of traffic. However, we still have the same frustrations about all that great non-fiction that very few people are reading!!

I do think that our job is to find out what people want and then (as long as it fits with our church's theology and vision) get it, when possible. So if someone asks us about a fiction author, or a specific book by an author, we will usually buy it. We have an extensive adult fiction collection. We also have a lot of elementary age books, some YA, and a pretty good picture book area.

We had a Library Open House in February, with donut holes to attract people in, and we had specific times for the various children's and JR HI SS classes to come in, so we could tell them about the library, show them how to check out a book, tell them about our summer reading programs.

We also do a pre-school story time during the SS hour - each age group comes a different week-2's, 3's, 4's and K - sometimes the other librarian and I do it, but we also have some ladies on our library committee who are helping with that.

We have set up a facebook page for our church library, and there we put announcements that relate to the library, book reviews, "what's new in the library", that kind of thing. Other people besides the library committee are encouraged to review books there, and some do.

We try to put out seasonal stuff - like right now, we have books about the Cross, the meaning of Easter, that kind of thing, as well as kids' books and dvd's about Easter.

I have yet to post here having spent a good portion of the year cataloging and weeding for our approximately 1700 volume library. I too have had that moment of what am I doing here based on circulation figures. I did find an evaluation system that said more or less, count your potential borrowers, multiply by 2 to 5, and that will give you a size range for the number of volumes you should own. Aim for 20% of your volumes to be in circulation at one time, but realize that you will have to work up from a much lower percentage. But that benchmark should keep you from going nuts about how many books are circulating. Think about your public library...there are always a lot of books on the shelf every time you walk in the door.

Weeding: we do evaluate for classic or denominationally important books but try to keep our range of books 15 years old or newer. Since we have an extensive Bible study section with older Anchor and Barclay commentaries and a fair number of theology classics from a former religion professor, the 220s are less fresh looking than other areas. I have extensively weeded this section twice in the last 10 years -- the first time for areas other than the 200s and the second time for everything with particular attention to current thinking and interest areas, moving toward a contemporary collection. At this point all our adult fiction -- a small group of about 150 books -- rotates out every 5 years. We fill in by skimming the donations to our annual book sale and very occasionally snapping something up at thrift store, tho the thrift store is a better bet for non fiction.

I weeded the children's area in 1995 and removed half the books because they were quite dated. I again weeded two more times in the last 10 years while building the section. I have tied about half of our picture books to the Revised Common Lectionary for use by CE and by doing that I was able to get a real focus for what we should and should not collect. I don't think that I would have been able to write a collection policy in advance for children's, but came to one over time based on observed uses.

Collecting: We add about 50 books a year, a little less than half coming from the book sale donations. I read Publishers Weekly religion section, the year end best of lists, and reviews in Christian Century, Christianity Today, Kirkus and a few other places for ideas but I have a rough collection building plan that guides the spending.

Publicizing: I have a basket of a few new purchases upstairs in the room where we have coffee after church. I find people would rather discover than have you tell them. However, if someone comes into the library, I do a bit of what is called in the industry of "hand selling," pulling a book off the shelf and talking about why I like it and he or she might, too. Sometimes a book gets mentioned in Common Ministry. I'm proud to say that often I can say -- the library has that book. And that's just a matter of keeping your ears open to ideas, questions and opinions that get floated around by church leaders and others.

I am looking forward to the day (pretty soon I'm told) when the library will have its own page on the website that I can update (Wordpress) and we have our computer look up station installed in the library.

I'm a reader, and I believe that reading is good for everyone. You don't need to read a lot of books about religion, faith or doing good. A couple a year is all I am calmly plotting to get the congregation to read.

We have restarted our library a few years ago. From a shelf in the storage room to a dedicated room. What I've heard that brings people in is the room itself, warm and relaxing, and word of mouth. I started with a survey, a slide in the prelude announcements (we have projected services), and writings in the monthly newsletter. This brought in the readers of the congregation but not so much with the non-readers or young people.

What really helped in children's and teen was emphasizing the books that are a part of the local school's reading program, Accelerated Reader. Then I asked each of the kids what they would like when I was going to go shopping. We are a smaller community, about 300 members. I make sure my new books are part of the Accelerated Reader program and then point out the books I got for the individual kids in person. This started with just one kid and has spread to several families. What I have found is that most of them didn't even know there was christian fiction books for teens or kids or that they were part of the school reading program. Especially in the fantasy or adventure genre which are popular right now. I also read all the books so I can give them my opinion as they are hesitant to start a unknown author. I talked with the confirmation class about the library and how it would fit with their school work with the reading program. They were shocked to learn the books of the Bible were a part of the program.

My goal is to expand our readership from the bottom up. Our older generations didn't need to get much education to get jobs in town and they don't read much. But this is different for the newer generations. I hope that as the kids grow they will see the library are a resource for them in their spiritual lives. It does help that reading is such an emphasis in our schools and I am a substitute in the schools and can pick up on what interests them. I think the read-a-thon is a great idea for our sunday school summer program too.

I am new to the public school library. I am also new to Accelerated Reading program. I want to order more books for K-3rd grade but I do not know how to search for them. Any ideas?

If you don't have someone to ask at school, you could call the companies you order from. We're not in the AR program, but a lot of our patrons are so this is how I find AR books.

On the AR website you can search for specific books on what is call the AR Book Finder (http://www.arbookfind.com). Under the Advanced Search Tab you can narrow down your search.

This is what I would put in the search criteria.
Interest Level: Lower grade (LG k-3).
Additional Criteria:
Topic :XXXXXX
Subtopic: XXXXXX

That does bring up a lot of titles, but you can put in more search criteria.

When I browse the books and find promising books I press the Add to Book Bag button. Then I can print out my whole list when I'm done. However, it will reset the bag if the browser is closed or not added to it for a long time.