{"id":340,"date":"2012-05-01T16:11:41","date_gmt":"2012-05-02T00:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/?p=340"},"modified":"2012-05-01T16:11:41","modified_gmt":"2012-05-02T00:11:41","slug":"national-poetry-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/2012\/05\/national-poetry-month\/","title":{"rendered":"National Poetry Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

I sometimes find myself feeling a little competitive (in a friendly way!) with another library<\/a> in my state university system: their social media has tended to be quite good, they have a banana tree, their library has a giant raven statue<\/a>(!!) outside and might just generally be prettier than ours, they once made librarian trading cards<\/a> (link goes to a general pool of cards, not to theirs specifically), and they put up a “Poet Tree” last year, to celebrate National Poetry Month. They are a fairly small academic library staff that nevertheless find time to do some pretty fun things, and I admire them for that. But I also think to myself “We can do all that, too!”<\/p>\n

In general, I keep sticking on this idea of making the library more pleasant, no matter whether we’re talking about the web site, social media, physical space, customer service, or any other aspect of our students’ interaction with us. If the library can be fun, at least sometimes, I want it to be. I want people to have a generally positive association with us. So, as part of that, and partially inspired by our colleagues elsewhere in the state, I really wanted to do something “interactive” for National Poetry Month, this year.<\/p>\n

Our amazing Student Worker Supervisor, Kristi, usually ends up in charge of displays, so I approached her and our Social Media Team (which she’s on\u00e2\u20ac\u201dlike I said, she’s great) to ask for ideas. I should admit, Poetry Month was already upon us, by this point. So some of our more involved ideas, such as poetry contests, had to be put off for a year. (I also had to put a warning on my calendar, to plan Poetry Month ahead of time, so we don’t make that mistake again.) But we made a list of poetry books, she and some students assembled a display, and I painted a piece of foam board that I had lying around with some magnetic primer (which I also had\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI took the opportunity to paint the thing I had been planning to make magnetic, in my house, at the same time as I implemented this project). We set that and two boxes of magnetic poetry (the college edition and the Shakespeare edition – as you can see from the video<\/a>, those mix interestingly) out on the display, put up a little bit of example poetry, and left it alone.<\/p>\n

Out of curiosity, I took a photo each day, to see how the display would change over time. It does seem to have been used! I’m going to call this one a success:\u00c2\u00a0Magnetic Poetry<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I sometimes find myself feeling a little competitive (in a friendly way!) with another library in my state university system: their social media has tended to be quite good, they have a banana tree, their library has a giant raven statue(!!) outside and might just generally be prettier than ours,…<\/p>\n

Continue readingNational Poetry Month<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-librarianship","category-web-2-0","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}