Help needed-save the books

[Barbara Johnson <bjohnson@NETROPOLIS.NET>]

Dear Everyone:
This is not a cry for help because of book challenge, or a budget cut (too
early!), or even a natural disaster, but rather a cry for help with a
circulation problem! :-)  It is one of my goals this year to circulate more
of my hardback fiction collection to our middle school students. I noticed
that there were many hardbacks that did not circulate and have probably
never been checked out, although they have been on the shelves for several
years. We could, I suppose, have a discussion on why kids prefer
paperbacks, etc.., but instead I'm going to ask for you help with an idea!

I'd like to design a "Save the Books" campaign. This is briefly what I have
in mind: I'm going to select a group of books that have not been checked
out (ever) or at least not recently (last 3 years) and tag them with a book
mark that says "Save Me! Ask the Librarian How!" My goal is to get at least
2-3 kids to read the book and write a brief review of the book--good or
bad--and mark on the review whether we should save the book for other kids
to read. Kids will be picked at random to videotape their reviews for our
school-wide video presentation system (coming soon...). Reviews will also
be posted for others to read about the book. A new set of books will be
selected for each quarter.

I have asked several reading teachers if they would be interested in
helping me by involving their students with incentives (extra points?) to
read a book from the "Save Me" collection and they seem enthusiastic about
the idea. We do have readers at our school (thank goodness) and I'm hoping
this will meet a variety of needs-including a justification (? I use the
term lightly friends!) to help me with some badly needed weeding of the
fiction collection.

Before I leap into this--does anyone have any words of wisdom? Ideas to
make this fun? Promotional methods? Time-saver tips? Other fiction weeding
tips? Please email me directly! Thanks in advance!

Barb :-)
Barbara Johnson, Librarian
Albright Middle School
Houston, Texas 77083
bjohnson@netropolis.net

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