New Book Bribery

Right now there are too many New Young Adult books at the library. Actually, there are always too many books in this area - I really need additional shelf space so that I can keep books on the New shelf for more than 2.5 months. Unfortunately though, the New shelf is full to the point of overflowing right now. This is a slow time of year in terms of circulation as everyone is done with the Summer Reading Program but most have not yet fallen into their school-year routines, so the large number of books on the shelf isn't entirely surprising.

Of all the terrible problems to have, right?

The circulation department was getting a bit anxious about the lack of space on this shelf and asked me to do something about it. Since I can't magically make the New Books area larger it soon became clear that books needed to be taken off the shelf. I'd much prefer that this be done via checkouts rather than de-newing, so my supervisor and I have instituted a program encourage *coughbribecough* patrons to check out books from this part of the collection.

The program is simple: If someone checks out a book from the New Young Adult area and shows one of children's librarians which book(s) they will be taking home, then we will give them a "prize pack" as a reward. Easy!

These prize packs are made up of coupons that we had left over from our Summer Library Program anyway, so we did not have to spend any money at all on this program. I made up a few fliers to post in the library, bookmarks to stick inside each of the books in the New YA area, and posted a blurb about this promotion on our Facebook page. This promotion is available "for a limited time only" - basically until we either run out of prizes or the New YA Books situation is under control.


This picture was taken about four hours after we first advertised the program. Already there is more shelf space than there was before...but it's still not much. In a normal scenario the top shelf would be empty/mostly empty so that you can see the sign that labels this area as "New YA Fiction". In an ideal scenario, none of these shelves would be even close to filled and I'd be able to turn a couple of books face-out.


There is another benefit to this promotion: Teens have to come and talk to us to pick up their prize packs. We can use this opportunity to talk of upcoming Teen programs! I'm really hoping to recruit a few more people for my Teen Book Club though this effort.

And who knows, maybe a few teens will discover a new area of the library or a new favorite book through this promotion too!