Library Shouts

Several weeks ago we ordered a book for the children's nonfiction collection called Sneaky Art: Crafty Surprises to Hide in Plain Sight.  Written by Marthe Jocelyn, this book has lots of cute, whimsical crafts that can be pieced together with everyday objects and left behind in certain locations as art. 

As we were paging though the book, one of the projects in particular caught our attention:  Library Shouts.  To do this project, you basically cut out some paper in the shape of a speech bubble and decorate it with words, shapes, stickers, stamps, cutouts...whatever you have on hand.  You then stick the bubble's tail in a book.  The idea is that the speech bubble will draw attention to the book and encourage people to pick it up.

I thought this was a perfect project for my Teen Advisory Group, and my teens agreed.  We changed the format slightly and made bookmarks with a large, oval-shaped bubble at the top.  This shape seemed to provide a bit more stability, plus it fit a bit better in the relatively narrow space between the top of the books and the next shelf.  During this week's TAG group the teens took the bookmarks and went to town decorating them.  We used magazine cutouts (mostly for the sake of mismatched letters), construction paper, markers, and sequins to make our Library Shouts look amazing.  When they were finished I laminated all of the Library Shouts so that they will - hopefully - last a little bit longer.  Then it was just a matter or sticking them inside books that we loved!

We placed all of our Library Shouts in books in the Young Adult area since this is the collection near and dear to the teens' hearts. But theoretically we could use these bookmarks anywhere in the library!

I also was sure to get my library's circulation department on board with this project. My hope is that the circ staff will be able to take the bookmarks when patrons go to check these books out and return them to me so that I can reuse them in other books. I don't expect that we'll be able to keep these Library Shouts forever - eventually they'll get lost or walk away - but we want to be able to use this promotion for as long as possible.