Barbican Library : The children / YA/ TEEN section
After resting in my dorm to let my stomach settle, I left and took the tube to the Metropolitan Line, Barbican station. It was pretty straigthtforward, thank goodness. I got to the Barbican Library and met my group. The Branch manager gave us a tour of the City of London Barbican Library.
I arrived when they were taking us to the childrens' and young adult room. They have in one room children, teens, and young adults, all together, which is very different from American public libraries. In the US, libraries are designed to provide dedicated spaces to each group age: one area for toddlers, other for tweens, another for teens or young adults.
This is a picture of the Children's section. I loved the Shaun the Sheep prop in between the computers!
I liked how the childrens' area shelves are organized. These are very low so they can reach or browse for their books. The librarian or person in charge of shelving may need to use a rolling stool, but I think is a good idea to allow kids to get involved as early as possible with their book searching.
As a school library clerk in an elementary school, I was concerned with grouping books by reading level. Because our students were a majority English language learners, we used to label our books noting the Fontas and Pinel reading level or the Lexile level. When I saw the shelves in the childrens' section the classification is more generic. First the picture books, then first readers.
Then the next shelves are grouped by age: Stories 5 years and up, or ten years and up. They are color coded to suggest reading levels.
The non-fiction area has labels with Dewey decimal and subject, and in addition it shows the subject. I wished I had the budget to make this type of signage at the elementary school library I worked. Our dinosaur books were the most popular. I had to reorder several books on a regular basis.
The children's librarian gaves us an overview of the programming services available for children and the partnerships he is working on to support children's literacy services. These are very similar to the ones offered in the US.
Another section that caught my attention was the music library. People can sign up to play instruments, teach themselves or have instrument lessons. How cool is that! The library also allows users to check out musical scores of every genre pretty much. It is amazing how many services they are putting together. [ Insert picture here]
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