Look at your Signage

If you can, try to empty your head of the familiarity of your library and walk through it as if for the first time to see if your library is user-friendly with good signage. Okay, if that's too hard, grab a student or person unfamiliar with your library and give them several different items to find and ask them to walk through and locate them just by reading the signs. Then ask them to be honest in their assessment. Was it easy to find what they were searching for? Was the library well organized and easy to maneuver around it?

The brown paper cut-out panels above the shelves are an inexpensive way to decorate the library and also provide good navigational signs. Each panel illustrated something found in that section of the shelves.

Our library had only six computers for patron use, and often our language arts classes average about 30 students per class. Not everyone was able to access the online catalog every time they visited, or sometimes the network would go down and the computers were useless, so I wanted to make sure students could still find their way around the library using the signage.

Years ago, librarians were the keepers of the information-- they were the key hole through which patrons had to go to find the information they were seeking. Today, librarians roles have changed drastically. Librarians teach students and patrons how to find books and information for themselves, and part of that includes providing good signage and teaching students how to navigate their way around the library using those signs.

Keep the signage simple; use easy to read fonts; fancy fonts are distracting. Vary the size of the signs; the largest for the major sections [FICTION, BIOGRAPHIES, the Dewey major section numbers, etc.], down to smaller end shelf signs.

I received a good tip from a lady who worked with special ed students. On both ends of the fiction shelves in the middle of the library, I added nice, easy to read letter ranges to help students quickly find the fiction authors they were seeking. The SPED teacher asked if I would also print out the entire range, not just the beginning and end letters of the authors' last names, to help those students who struggled with the alphabet. I was happy to comply. They looked similar to this:

A - F

A - B - C - D - E - F

Teach students to read the alphabetized shelves by section - left to right; up to down before moving to the next section.

Make the major Dewey division signs the largest for students to easily find the section they are looking for.

In the shelves using the Dewey Decimal System, try to keep the shelves together in numerical order. It's confusing to shelve the numbered books in different areas of the library. All of our numbered books were in shelves against the walls that wrapped around three sides of the library, so I put large signage above each major section of the Dewey - 000's, 100's, 200's, 300's, etc. so the students could see the section they were looking for from anywhere in the library. On the individual shelves, I added many subject signs [Civil Rights, Fairy Tales, Solar System, Weather, etc.] that also included pictures that were very helpful to the students. 

Teach students how to read numerical order, especially the decimal fractions. It's much easier for them to understand if you teach them to read it like money; kids understand money. I have several very inexpensive posters and lessons in my Teachers Pay Teachers store that let students practice alphabetizing and putting call numbers in numerical order. Both are important skills for students to learn for life, and skipping over those skills makes it harder for them later.

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I tell myself that maybe a paraprofessional might be reading this and could learn something from these posts. Sadly, too many school districts are replacing certified librarians with paraprofessionals; that happened to my job. But students still need to learn their way around a well-organized library complete with good signage.