Our New Margaret Wise Brown Reading Room

As you can imagine, we have a massive collection of some of the best picture books for our Graduate Programs in Children's Literature and Illustration here at Hollins University. We used to keep them all in file boxes and pull them out for students to use during summer semesters, then pack them back up again and put them in storage.Well, now that we're expanding our programming to have a year-round option, students will need access to the books all year round; and since we've been receiving so many books as a result of our Margaret Wise Brown Prize (a Hollins alum), the collection has grown immensely and will keep doing so. So, we sought a more permanent space (at least for the time being). This is the space we decided to move into. It is a study space (and will still be), but only had one set of shelves and a bunch of old books noone was using anymore.
This was actually years in the making, and shelves had to be procured from one of our offices. Here are two of our facilities heroes, Andrew and Ryan, making sure the shelves are in place and configured as needed. Student worker, Elizabeth helped place all the books on the shelves once they were up. Sorting the books and labeling them was going to be the work of my Picture Book Trends workshop. As it turned out, Karen Coats, head of the Children's Lit program at the University of Cambridge wanted to come help. We ended up coming up with a brand new categorization system (I'll write a summary article about all this soon) that will make more sense in the long run and help the collection to grow. I had book dividers printed as our old dividers were looking quite tired.We categorize our books via theme because our students oftentimes don't know who created a book, or even a title, they'll just know, for example: I want to write a story on "Friendship." What other books are there on friendship?" Hence, the theme-based categorization method.Arranging the categories on the shelves was no small task. To be most strategic, we kept having to move them around. But we ended up quite happy with our results. And, of course, we featured Margaret Wise Brown's books and our prize winners. We also created a display area for this year's MWB Prize winners.And I added touches to mimic the Great Green Room from one of her most famous books, Goodnight Moon, by adding a red balloon and red carpets...And Green beanbag chairs meant to represent the bed.There's even a yellow rocking chair - I'll have to share a photo of that later. And Ashley Wolff, one of our summer professors, is going to create the windows from The Great Green Room this summer. So, there will be more to share soon!
     In the mean time, I'm thrilled to have our books in this space where more people can enjoy them and students can use them year-round!!!