Monday, March 16, 2026

Picture Book Neighborhoods: Amphibians and Reptiles


 These are two small collections. They are actually separate, alphabetically, although I have thought about combining them since so few people seem to know what an amphibian is and the difference between them and reptiles. However, I decided to at least try to instill some basic natural information in our patrons (and staff). Since these collections are so small, I'm not really that picky about what I add and the last time I updated the collections I stopped trying to have specific call numbers.

Incidentally, some titles are not on the recommended list just because I am pretty sure they are out of print.

Recommended titles - nonfiction


Recommended series
  • Truth about... by Eaton
  • About... by Sill
  • Place for... by Melissa Stewart
  • First field guide
  • Day in the life...

Recommended titles - fiction

Fiction and nonfiction titles reviewed in the past



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Friday, March 13, 2026

Collection Development in the world of 2026: Part 1 How we got here

Some of the YA nonfiction that I
STILL haven't had time to weed
since the collection space was
significantly downsized last year.

After the collapse of Baker & Taylor last year, which I totally saw coming, I've made major changes in how I order materials, especially as I am working with new vendors.

I've always preferred to do the bulk of my orders at the beginning of the year - while it means running out of money in the fall, it also means that nobody can cut my budget if I've already spent it! While the latter is not likely now, it happened too many times in the past for me to let that habit go.

In the past I did a lot of preorders. There's nothing like that delicious little thrill when you're the first library in your consortium to get a new book! However, that just doesn't work well with my new vendors and workflow, so I have let that go.

I did a lot of weeding in the past year or two, preparing for our renovations - some things, like our JBC (beginning chapter books) I had expected to be able to easily replace in bulk. However, prices have gone up so much that it's no longer possible and I have accepted that it will take longer to fill in those gaps in the collection. I'm also trying to get used to the new layout and arrangement of shelves and collections. Yes, I'm the person who did (most of) the layout, but it still takes time to adjust!

Finally, I have to account for the gradual but definite change in reading trends in my community. Complex, chapter-length nonfiction and realistic middle grade fiction over 200 pages has dropped in circulation. Middle grade fantasy series rarely circulate after the first title. There may be other changes based solely on the new organization of the collection, but those will take a while to fully develop.

Finally, although my budget hasn't changed and I even got a slight increase this year, in practical effect it's shrunk - the rise in prices and the potential loss of several of my grant/donation sources means the effective loss of approximately $5,000.

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Monday, March 9, 2026

Picture Book Neighborhoods: Pets


This section is almost completely fiction. When I first made the neighborhoods, pets were put into "community" (not my idea) and that was one of the first things I fixed when I first updated the collection. The few nonfiction books are mostly series nonfiction about dogs and cats.

Storytime Picks


Popular series/authors


Classic titles

Recommended and favorite titles

Additional titles I have previously reviewed

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Saturday, March 7, 2026

February 2026: This month in the collection

Right now there are still several carts worth of materials waiting for our TS department to get to them. Some new things, but mostly a huge number of beginning chapter replacements. I'll be posting soon my new workflows for ordering but the main thing is that I'm no longer focusing on new publication dates, so some of these items will be backlist titles. The picture books are coming in March and the nonfiction is on hold until I finish weeding the collection.

Library Pinterest - new materials
Unless otherwise noted, all items were purchased for or added to the library collection


Board Books
  • Twinkle Twinkle Little Sheepy
  • Bunny's wobbly bottom by Kit Frost
  • Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt 9798217120949
    • This is a library-friendly, sturdy version of this classic board book
  • Digging for dinosaurs beneath the street by June Smalls
  • Your Truck by Jon Klassen


Picture Books

Early Readers and Transitional Chapters
  • Letter Setters in Fun by Ethan Long (Ready to Read collection)
  • Beginners Bible titles (new Early paperback collection)
  • Mighty Construction Machines from Crabtree (nonfiction early reader set)
  • Momo sees the sea by Avani Dwivedi
  • Nat the Cat finds a map by Jarrett Lerner
  • Pencil and Eraser: New Friends Rule
  • Pizza and Taco Go Viral
  • Narwhal and Jelly: Waffle lot of love
Beginning Chapter Books (new series)
  • Tuck and Tina by Jess Brallier
  • Fairy Scouts by Hannah Fay
  • Cosmic Creatures by Tom Huddleston
  • Fairies Welcome by Bea Jackson
  • Witchycakes by Kara LaReau
  • Wildlife Rescue by Kate Messner
Juvenile Fiction


Young Teen
  • Academy by T. Z. Layton vol. 3-4
    • This is extremely popular at our middle school - the books are being republished, so vol. 3 was an additional copy and vol. 4 was new.
  • Alexandra Moody - backlist
    • A group of homeschooled teen girls are reading these and have been requesting them via inter-library loan, so I bought our own copies.
  • Gumshoe by Brenda Thummler
    • I went back and forth on location for this, but I have the creator's Sheets series in young teen, so put this one in there as well.
Young Adult
These are the new items that checked out right away - sometimes multiple times - this month.
  • Sibylline by Melissa de la Cruz
  • Always raining here by Hazel and Bell
  • My life as an internet novel
  • Juvenile by Jesus Orellana
  • Perks of being an S-Class Heroine (series)
    • Full disclosure - the checkouts were me and my staff. But I am sure the teens will read them. When we're done.
  • Graveyard Club by R. L. Stine
  • Villains are destined to die (series)
  • Finding her edge by Jennifer Iacopelli
  • House Saphir by Marissa Meyer
  • How we play the game by Alexis Nedd
  • Obsession by Natasha Preston
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Sunday, March 1, 2026

February 2026 in review - Looking forward to March

New items from a donor - road rug

I'm finishing off the month of February with a miserable sinus thing. Yay me. I did get a New Book Spotlight for March out, but I still have February reports and my March presentation for the PowerUp! Youth Symposium to complete. 

I actually took a week off and visited family in El Paso - the weather was really nice, the flights there and back were pretty horrible, but overall it was a very nice break.

The one big program we had this month was our Eric Carle Celebration. I usually do this on a Tuesday morning when Miss Esther doesn't have storytime and use it to promote our Read and Grow program (which I also need to update here!). It went very well, but mostly it was a learning experience of what we're going to need to adjust when we get back to a full set of programs.

I got the bare bones of our summer reading schedule and programming completed at the very end of February but we have a lot of work ahead of us.

Topics I've been musing on this month - what will programming, for us, look like in the future? Whose idea was traditional programming anyways and can I send them all my complaints? Will I be able to cover the youth desk this summer without all of us keeling over from exhaustion? Am I going to have to squeeze furniture out of my budget or will I be able to reuse some of the junk I put in the basement? Given that people have to pass through the Activity Room to get to the Create Space, how am I going to run the Create Space without it being filled with a ton of rambunctious toddlers?

I have another vacation in March, for which I hope I will not be sick. We also have two weeks to move all the adult fiction and adult nonfiction. I will be gone for a week of this. Our public bathrooms in the lobby will close down during the last week of the month, which is Spring Break. My projects for March are trying to get the Library of Things under control so I can finally resume work on the juvenile/YA nonfiction collections, catching up on the new books, which kind of came in all at once, supervising the teens finishing up decorating the new space, and lots and lots of work to do for summer.

New items from a donor - magnet board


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Saturday, February 7, 2026

February 2026 Update


 One week in and I've made quite a bit of progress. We resumed a simple slate of programming and have been seeing pretty large groups for our one in-house storytime. I had a second strong turnout of TAB middle and high schoolers decorating the Teen Space. The mural artist (a former teen aide) finished the paintings and we've resumed Read and Grow. I won't be doing a "This Month in the Collection" post for January, but I did squeeze out a small new book spotlight.

The two main things I focused on this week were inputting the backlog of replacements and new books into my cataloging spreadsheet (our cataloger is backed up, so there are boxes in my office - she'll get to them as soon as she can) and booking summer programs. I didn't plan to do the latter this week, but it turned out there's a deadline I need to meet, since most of my performers are done in some conjunction with summer school. I have *almost* got things confirmed.



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Sunday, February 1, 2026

Looking forward to February


 This month should be a brief respite before we start the final leg of our renovations. In the youth department, we are starting a basic schedule of programming:

  • Mondays: Paws to Read
  • Tuesdays: Minecraft Hangout
  • Thursdays: Pokemon Hangout
  • Fridays: Words and Wiggles Storytime
My staff member will continue to go to storytime at the Rec center on Tuesdays. The only outreach we are continuing is her monthly visits to our county special education school - some years they come on field trips, but we can reach more of the students with a visit to the school. I have had teachers ask about resuming outreach visits and it's hard for me to say no, but with the new schedule needed to adequately staff the new youth department, it just isn't possible unless I take on a lot more desk time or do the outreach myself, neither of which I have the time or capacity for. We'll also have TAB meetings several times a month while we're continuing to work on the Teen Space and monthly Youth D&D.

I've started weeding and reorganizing our circulating kits - this is loooong overdue, we have a ridiculous number of kits in storage with missing/broken pieces and all the inventory/records need updating. I also need to get started on weeding the juvenile nonfiction - I started more than a year ago and had to move on to work on other things - but that may not happen this month.

We'll end the month with an Eric Carle party on a Tuesday morning - this will substitute for a day when our school colleague can't offer storytime and restart our Read and Grow program.

Only three youth spaces are left to reopen - our activity room, create space, and Quiet Room. We should get the Quiet/Nursing room reopened very soon, since it just needs some paper on the walls as a temporary cover until we're able to get them mudded and sanded so we can repaint.



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Saturday, January 31, 2026

January 2026 in review


 Amazingly we actually managed to finish pretty much everything I had planned for January. The family storytimes offered by a colleague from our local school district are still being held at the recreation center - this will probably continue until summer for consistency and continuity. However, one of my staff has been taking library materials and our outreach library out on Tuesday morning and we've seen a resulting increase in traffic in the youth department.

Our next move went off fairly well. Circulation, Adult Services, and Technical Services were moved into the renovated workroom downstairs, our director moved into his new office, and I and my staff moved into the old Adult Services office upstairs. We did have to do an emergency clean of the office, and a lot of maneuvering to get things to fit and be in proximity to the outlets and access points. Once Technical Services had moved to their new space, the Teen Space was open. 

We had initially planned to move the YA collection into this space (it had not been moved upstairs with the rest of the youth department) and either recycle shelves or purchase inexpensive shelving. However, the committee overseeing our grant and renovations decided the Teen Space should not contain any teen materials. After much discussion, it was decided that the manga collection (and two shelves of circulating toys, kits, and games) would be in the Teen Space and the layout would be rearranged to accommodate the rest of the young adult collection. We removed a seating area (and aforementioned shelves of kits) and our movers shifted the shelves continuing our Young Teen, juvenile audiovisual materials, and popular series (Minecraft, Disney, etc.) farther into the aisle and closer together (keeping the minimum 3 feet). They then brought up from storage in the basement and reconfigured a shelf for the young adult fiction, graphic novels, and nonfiction in this space.




Construction, specifically electrical work, continues intermittently upstairs in the youth department. However, we did get all but one piece of stored furniture moved downstairs and only two spaces are still being used by construction, our Multipurpose Room (as an office) and our Activity Room (for storage). Our Lego Wall has been installed and we have made a lot of little adjustments and improvements to the space as a whole.


Although we don't officially resume programs until February, we did have a few the last week of January. I was able to get the Dungeon Master I had last summer to come in with very little notice and she ran a game for our Youth D&D (primarily ages 9-11). I also had a TAB meeting (now open to middle schoolers) once we had the Teen Space cleared out and they started working on decorating the space. We had NINE kids! Six of them came voluntarily! One was already there volunteering and was bemused but agreeable to painting instead of hauling furniture down to the basement and two middle school students had, I think, come to study, but were pleased to jettison those plans in favor of snacks and paint. My staff also resumed Friday morning storytimes on the 30th - she put in a lot of last-minute work to get the Storyroom usable.

Our mural is neeeeeearly finished, I have more or less finished the early reader weeding project, and I have settled on a blend of Bound to Stay Bound, Ingram, Mackin, and Amazon for vendors.

If anyone is curious, my location did NOT get snow, we got subzero temps. But we stayed open as we are a county-designated warming shelter and anyways I had a lot of stuff I needed to get done.

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Saturday, January 10, 2026

Picture Book Neighborhoods: Mammals


This is a large neighborhood, with close to 300 items, and is primarily nonfiction. The instructions I've written for it call for only realistic fiction, but I admit that has not totally eventuated, although I have tried to keep the fiction realistic. There's a lot of informational picture books as well, most of which I've included under the Dewey numbers. The most popular animals tend to have more books, so those sections have more detailed call #s including big cats, bears, dolphins, elephants, monkeys (including apes), sloths, whales, and wolves. It took a lot of my self-control to keep these categories child-friendly and simple and not get into the weeds of classification!

Recommended Nonfiction series

  • Amazing Animals from Creative Company
  • Young Zoologist: A First Field Guide
  • A Day in the Life: What do.... get up to all day?
  • The truth about... by Maxwell Eaton III
  • Just like us by Bridget Heos
  • Hello I'm a... by Hayley and John Rocco
  • You are a... by Laurie Ann Thompson
Recommended Authors
Recommended titles - Nonfiction
Recommended titles - Fiction
Other titles I've previously reviewed

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Sunday, January 4, 2026

Looking forward to January

Tree mural being painted.

  I am tentatively planning not to resume programs until February. We are starting another big shift of staff and materials and there are several things that aren't finished in the new youth department. We still have construction workers, supplies, and library storage in our program areas as well. I'm working on getting orders set up with our new book vendor(s), reorganizing the early reader section (again), and planning ahead for programs not only when we resume in February but also when all our new spaces are complete.

Hopefully this month we will get my department moved into a different workroom (we are currently in the program spaces), get our Lego wall installed, and get our self-check back up and running. I'm also hoping to finish my early reader project and get the Storyroom (one of three program spaces) ready to go for February.

We had planned to have the tree/meadow mural, shown above, finished by the end of the year so we could get the Read and Grow program materials back up. However, the delay in finishing the bathrooms which are directly opposite, meant this was delayed. So this will be finished in January sometime and then we'll get Read and Grow back up (that's our version of 1,000 books before kindergarten).

It looks like a very busy month, although we won't necessarily have much in the way of numbers (other than our hopefully increasing circulation) to show for it. I'm not, btw, actually looking forward to January, but it sounds like a good title.

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Tuesday, December 16, 2025

This week at the library; How it's going

My former aide painted a giant butterfly on our wall. 
She's currently working on a larger mural for our
Read and Grow program.

My school colleague's final storytimes at the Rec center went very well. Due to ongoing construction, we've decided she's going to keep Tuesday/Thursday storytime there through March and then in April she'll be holding one storytime at the library and one at the Rec center. Two of our Board members will start an afternoon storytime at the library in April, because they are made of bunnies and unicorns.

The bathrooms are not finished, but we are very, very close. I am tentatively going to start our limited slate of programs in February, since we don't know how things will go in January, moving staff spaces around and the big shift of shelves in the general, downstairs area.

There are a lot of reasons I am relieved storytime is being postponed; one of them is definitely that I need some more time to discover all the interesting little quirks about my "new" program rooms. Like the marble-sized wooden balls on the molding that have started falling off randomly.

Among many other things, I have started making a processing guide, which I'm hoping my staff will fill in the details of, and working on various weeding projects which never end.

Highlighted book reviews so far this month:

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Monday, November 24, 2025

This week at the library; Looking forward to holidays and end of the year


Programs
  • Family Storytime (offsite at Rec center)
  • Santa Storytime (offsite at Rec center)
Outreach
  • Lakeland School
Self-directed programs
  • Pokemon Hangout
  • Minecraft Hangout
Notes
  • Technically I am not looking forward as I do not really like holidays. Time off is nice, but the whole holiday thing... eh.
  • We will be ending programs December 11. For the first time in several years I'm no longer responsible for organizing our participation in the Christmas parade, since my windows no longer look out over the parade grounds.
  • We are continuing to work on our projects as well as plan for next year and get ready for the big changes in January. On the schedule (tentatively):
    • Staff temporarily in the Teen Space move down to the new staff workroom.
    • YA collections downstairs move to a new area, under discussion.
    • Director moves into his new office downstairs, construction manager moves into director's old office, my staff and I move into a smaller workroom upstairs.
    • Storytime resumes in January in the library and Pokemon/Minecraft Hangout and Paws to Read move into the Activity Room, resuming in February
  • There's other stuff happening downstairs, but I'm just trying to focus on the many things in my own department. I am doing major plans for summer, which will, tentatively, be our "official" grand reopening.
See you all in 2026! I do plan to catch up on a lot of reviewing over the holidays, so check out my review blog, https://flyingoffmybookshelf.blogspot.com/

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Sunday, November 23, 2025

This week at the library; Settling in, November 4 - 22

Kids checking out the barn
and animals - first toys we put back
Programs
  • Family Storytime (offsite at Rec center)
  • Paws to Read
Outreach
  • Lakeland School
Self-directed programs
  • Pokemon Hangout
  • Minecraft Hangout
Notes
  • We had some Dav Pilkey-themed stuff for Children's Book Week, but since we had literally just moved everything and the area wasn't ready it wasn't as... organized as it might have been. However, people enjoyed it - we gave away posters, raffled off a prize box of books, and did a sticker poster of Dogman.
  • I took about a week and a half off and I encouraged my staff to take some time off too. We all needed to recover from the stress of the last few months and the physical labor of the last few weeks.
  • We are focusing on getting up new signage, sorting and organizing toys so we can start restocking our new play areas (we have 3 spaces now!), and organizing the huge mess of supplies and misc. crammed temporarily into various spaces. I'm also still in the midst of several weeding projects and am trying to do some research into alternate vendors.
  • Most of the construction is downstairs now, but we are still waiting on some things to be finished upstairs, and there are a couple moves for youth services still coming in January, maybe.
  • I am physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted at this point. I will be slowly working on catching up on chores and getting back to having a life outside of work.

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