Unshelving January: Book Display Ideas

 

It is almost 2025 which means it's time to work on your merchandising plan for your collection. Setting up a plan, several months in advance, allows your library to figure out which displays will go where and who will be responsible for them. This also will give you time to verify that which ever titles are picked include underrepresented authors and avoid bestselling, high profile authors where possible. Rotating responsibility for displays among staff will help a wide variety of titles to be unshelved while also encouraging every library worker in your building to dig deeper into your stacks. 

January has a variety of month long celebrations as well as celebration days. For January,I used a list sent out by the Florida Division of Library and Information Services which manages the state library.You can pick the ones that would best serve your community while giving them an opportunity to find something new. The month long events are fairly straightforward. For national hobby month, don't forget those fiction titles with references to hobbies in the title. There are tons of cozy mysteries which would qualify. Blood donors call to mind vampire titles for me. With an increased interest in that horror subgenre, it would be a great display. Poverty, mentoring, and financial wellness could all be combined with a partnership program from a community agency, even a passive one with information where patrons could get help and more information. 

 

Month-Long Events National Hobby Month National Blood Donor Month Poverty Awareness Month National Mentoring Month Financial Wellness Month  For New Year's Day, please avoid new year/new you and instead encourage patrons to discover, learn, and find something new. It's a more positive spin than endless displays of debt and diet books. Fiction can be added to all of these displays. Use books about building and engineering for LEGO day and police procedurals for Law Enforcement Appreciation Day. Thesaurus Day can include handouts with online resources related to grammar, books about words, thesauruses and dictionaries, as well as books with clever titles that involve puns as titles. Books by authors from those countries where the Lunar New Year is celebrated makes for a great display for adults. You can mirror these displays with titles for youth. Either mix them in or create a separate display, depending upon what your community prefers.  1: New Year’s Day 2: National Science Fiction Day 4: World Braille Day 9: Law Enforcement Appreciation Day 18: National Thesaurus Day 20: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day; Inauguration Day;  21: National Squirrel Appreciation Day 27: International Holocaust Remembrance Day 28: National LEGO Day 29: Lunar New Year

Schedule those displays now and enjoy your holidays!