Saturday, November 27, 2010

Mustang Book Swap


Most of my recent posts have been technology oriented, but this is a low tech event. The library is hosting a book swap for our teachers and students. Students can bring unwanted books to the library and they will receive tickets that they can exchange for new-to-you books in December. We have advertised with flyers, morning announcements and word of mouth with my book club members. I am contributing some of our duplicate copies, older paperbacks and a few other donated (but not good enough to catalog) books. I weeded the collection HEAVILY this summer when I took this position. I don't want to admit how many in a public forum like this, but lets just say we have a great start for our book swap. I have already had around twenty students bring in books, averaging around 7 books each and up to 30! I am having the swap over three days. I have a feeling that when students see others getting bags of books to take home that they will come with their own the next day. If students do not have any to swap they can purchase them for 25 cents starting on the second day. I also plan to give teachers some tickets to give to deserving students so they can shop.

I wanted to have this before the holiday so that students would have plenty to read over the break. Research shows that having reading material in the home improves reading. Amazing, right? Our student population includes over 50% receiving free or reduced lunch so money to buy books is often an issue. I hope that by having this book swap now and again before summer break I can make a small dent in combating this problem.

We are also offering a similar swap for the teachers. I have not had a big response, but I am hoping that interest will ignite after returning from this break.

If you have your own book swap I would love to hear about how you organize it or if you plan to have one I would love to hear how it goes. I will update after our book swap is complete.
Image: Book Color Histogram by Patrick Gage, Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike

2 comments:

  1. I have done a couple over the years. I enjoy it!! I've always let library workers help set it up, and then they get to go ahead and pick their books, a perk of coming early and returning between classes to fix messy tables. The first time I did it in the high school, we had a lot of summer reading books, which wound up being a problem as we had like ten copies of the same required summer reading book. How can I capitalize on that? Consider bringing the freshman campus in on it, and perhaps trade some books with them. We'll see.

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  2. I think I am going to have my book club members help with set up and get first dibs. I am looking forward to it.

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