Car "flowers"

You don't have to have flowers in an arrangement. To coincide with the summer reading program's theme of "Book a Trip" cars and road signs became the "flowers". Yes, a little abstract, but rather fun and fanciful don't you think?!

Merchandising Made Simple - The Book!

After 2 years of hard work, our book "Merchandising Made Simple: Using Standards & Dynamic Displays to Increase Circulation" is coming in June. http://lu.com/showbook.cfm?isbn=9781591585619

Order your copy today! It will for sure top the library bestseller list and keep those with display lust awake at night reading. We are very proud of this accomplishment, but discovered that writing a book is not so glamorous. Bazillions of emails have flown around in our quest to get photos, get permission for photos, and get the editors the right photos. Hours working on writing and editing and more writing and more editing and tracking down even more photos was a challenge. All this said, it was very fun too. We hope our enthusiasm and passion for merchandising and displays shines through in our book. Please let us know what you think of the book. We'd love to hear your comments. Criticism not so much.

Poppin'

I am super fortunate to work with so many creative people. Those doing displays at our branch keep a schematic of what displays are where and who is doing them and when. It also becomes a good lesson on just doing the display and letting it go. Others will pick up the fluffing as needed or take the initiative to switch it out if it isn't moving well. Recently, one of our dynamo librarians, Tara, had this analogy: Displays are like the bag of popcorn in the microwave. At first it is like "poppin" constantly. Then after a while the "poppin" dies down and you know you have to take it out or it will burn. Same for displays. Who wants one that's all burned up? And by burned up we mean not moving or moved so fast and then interest wained.
As long as we're talking popcorn, a great prop for oh so many displays: a popcorn bucket from your local movie theater. You can also turn it over and use as a lift or riser in a display.

Oh rats!

These precious little fellows jumped off the shelf at Watermark http://www.cleverpapers.com/ and asked to come back to the library. Pictured here above my monitor they have caused quite a ruckas. Now you may be thinking "why rats"? Well, the display possibilities are endless. Think Chinese New Year coming soon. However, they showed up the first week our new librarian Anne started in October. I handed them to her and asked her to create a display around rats. She later said she thought this was some sort of a new librarian hazing ritual. (Note to self: next new librarian assign display on snakes.) The "Oh Rats" display was very popular. So much so that weeks after is came down a young customer asked where "those books on rats were". Apparently, he saw the display and had been begging his mother ever since for a pet rat. They were back at the library to stock up on information. This made me pretty happy except that the mother was glaring at me the whole time. Perhaps I should have steered them to another display on cute, fluffy kittens. As you do displays you constantly learn what works and what doesn't. (Another note to self: remember to tell the custodian that the "trash" in the display is actually a prop and he doesn't have to remove it each morning.)