10-16-2026

Elementary age patrons officially have their own nonfiction section checking a major item off our to do list.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the library was closed Friday, October 2^nd for a work day. This annual closure gives us time to tackle a project that often requires making a mess and creating chaos before harmony is restored.

Miss Maria spends the bulk of her time organizing the craft supplies and materials from her programs that get shoved onto any available surface. Those shelves are incredibly tidy right now. I predict that will last until I take on another organizing and purging project. Those usually result in donated supplies neither one of us are able to simply toss away.

The rest of the staff and one volunteer spent the time moving books.

In order to create a new section, every book in the way needs to be taken off the shelves and found new homes. In September the juvenile nonfiction was removed from the 900s, the largest single area as it contains biographies and history books on such subjects as World War II and Wisconsin. The adult and teen nonfiction was then shifted to fill the holes in the shelves and take up fewer of them. The same was done for the smaller 800s section before the juvenile books were shelved in the newly opened space. On the work day, that same action had to take place for the remaining sections.

The movement didn’t stop there.

We were one of very few libraries in the system that separated children’s materials into five levels: early childhood, picture books, elementary chapter books, middle school, and high school. Confusingly our middle school level are labeled YA for young adult while the high school books are labeled T for teen. While we have kept that labeling system for now, we have merged the books. YA books were moved from next to the elementary books labeled J to the T section next to Family DVDs. That allowed juvenile nonfiction for flow from the same level fiction.

Since the adult nonfiction was weeded as we went and the books were already on shelves, the job seems like hard work but relatively easy to complete. It wasn’t simply because the shelves were overfull to the point of bowing. Flipping the shelves has the curve in the other direction giving us time to prevent them falling off their pegs. Leaving natural breaks between subjects and a few inches of space on every shelf allows for easy removing of books and room for future purchases.

It also left a cart of YA/T books on a cart. They will stay there for the time being while we plan the next stage, which begins with selecting books in the YA/T fiction and adult nonfiction to move to lower levels of the library. Next year, after our younger patrons have had time to explore the recently moved nonfiction at their level, that area will also be weeded.