Crack! Suddenly all the students in the Groves Media Center are looking around.
This is what you may have experienced if you were quietly reading in the library last year. What was supposed to be a quiet place for students to focus on reading and school work had been disrupted and their safety had been compromised. The ceiling tiles had started randomly falling in the Groves library. Due to this, our school library had to undergo renovations over the summer.
According to Jaime Sheena, our school librarian, “The original tiles were from the 50’s or 60’s, so the adhesive had started to go bad. They started dropping,” Sheena said.
In order to fix the issue of the falling tiles, they had to be taken down and the leftover adhesive on the ceiling had to be sanded down.
Now, without the ceiling tiles in the library, it has become echoey and a worse studying environment for students. This becomes a big problem when there are large classes in the library because a large amount of noise gets bounced around the library. Even if students are talking quietly, it can still be too loud in the library.
“We’re hoping that they do something because it totally changed the acoustics in here. It’s really loud and echoey. I know they were exploring using a certain kind of paint that absorbs sound, but it was way more expensive than just painting it.” Sheena said.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t get the paint approved, so the ceiling has been left bare. Sheena also told me that there are multiple options being discussed, such as adding some sort of fabric or panel that absorbs sound, but these options are still being looked into and the ceiling’s acoustics may not be fixed for a while.
These issues caused the library to briefly be closed at the start of the school year. The construction only started two weeks before school started, so the library was never expected to be available to students at the beginning of the school year, but thankfully there were few setbacks in the construction and the library was able to be reopened early in the school year.
Our school librarians have also been subtly changing the way our library looks in order to help entice Groves students to read more.
When asked about the changes, Sheena said, “We just wanted it to be more browsable for kids, because sometimes when books are just lined up on the bookshelf, you can’t see the cover. Sometimes the spine of the book doesn’t capture a kid’s attention, but when you see the front of the book it might grab your attention more.”
The library is now intended to look more like a bookstore, by displaying the covers of books. The hope is that people will be drawn to the cover art of the books more than the seemingly endless rows of boring book spines that would line the shelves otherwise.
“I think it’s been working,” Sheena said. “I noticed four kids came in today to check out books, and they all checked out books from on top of the shelves.”
The librarians want to replicate the feeling of walking by a table in a bookstore and wondering, “What’s this book? What are these books about?”
Sheena also discussed how she chooses what books to display and rotate to continually attract students’ attention.
“I like to put the newest books that we’ve gotten on display or books that are really popular,” Sheena said. “I also like to rotate them so that it isn’t always the same books facing out.”
Although the Groves library was closed at the beginning of this school year, students can hope that the majority of changes are out of the way and look forward to a more accessible and better-functioning library for the foreseeable future. The changes that have been made to it should make for a much better experience for students for years to come.
