Perhaps your adult took you to get your first card as a child, and you’ve appreciated libraries ever since. Wherever you go, you’re sure to make getting a library card a routine part of getting accustomed to your new town. That’s been my story, and may be yours too. Maybe you’re like some of our patrons, who know their library cards so well, they’ve got their card numbers memorized.

Here are our current library card designs:

Which do you think is the most popular? I’ll fill you in at the end…

Frequently library patrons come into GPL as adults to get their very first library card, and it’s a special feeling to work with them. There are several aspects to getting a library card that can surprise first-time users. Here are a few:

· You need to present an I.D., preferably with your current address on it. We’ll definitely take a piece of mail as proof of your residence as well. Unfortunately, many first timers are surprised that I.D. is required. We always urge them to take the application form with them and come back with their I.D. I don’t know what percentage do, and it feels like a missed opportunity when someone walks out the door without a card. But that person without an I.D. may need some time to sort it out.

· You don’t need housing to get a library card. Sometimes unhoused patrons are under the impression that they’re not eligible for a card. Many of GPL’s unhoused patrons will use the address of a local social services provider that allows them to receive mail there as their address of record.

o We have an unhoused patron who uses interlibrary loan to borrow magazines. He only looks at them in the library, because he’s afraid of getting them dirty at his campsite. The Holds shelf serves as an unofficial space where he can keep a few magazines occasionally and not worry about his housing situation preventing him from borrowing materials.

· The library offers library card applications in Spanish. This is how it should be, but sometimes in a town that’s only 6% Latinx, patrons can be surprised.

A few things surprise me about adult patrons who are getting their card for the first time, or after a very long time without a card:

· The pride new patrons take in getting their cards. It’s free, there’s no money involved, and anyone can get one, yet it still evokes a happy feeling to get one. Could it be that people actually value the materials they can take out at GPL? Even if they’re getting that card just to be eligible to borrow a hotspot, they’re becoming part of the library community. I think that speaks volumes about the relevance of GPL to the larger community.

· The ways in which certain communities of enthusiastic new users want to see themselves reflected in their reading material. We all have different information needs, and I’ve observed that some people returning to reading after a long time away are really pumped up about it, and the most specific in their requested material. I’m thinking in particular about patrons in rehab in recovery houses who come in groups looking for materials relating to their recovery. I don’t know if you can generalize this observation, but it’s exciting to help these patrons!

· The reverence with which most new users observe the rules and guidelines of the library. For instance, new users are limited to taking out two items during their first week or so, while their registration is being processed by the higher-ups. In some ways it’s an arbitrary number—why not one? Or three? But I’ve never seen anyone protest this rule. It’s like they want to buy into the structure of the library system. I think there’s psychological material there to contemplate, for the willing soul.

As I contemplate the new library card user, I’m aware of all the history of Greenfield Public Library cards I don’t have access to. The years of designs, the days in which the cards were made of paper, the experiences of children getting their cards for the first time.

I never worked a day in the old library, so I have no ownership in its history. But I bet there are some of you out there whose library lives bridge the gap between the old and the new, between old library cards and the latest version. Share your memories, if you’re so inclined. I’d love to learn more about what it was like.

And as I promised to reveal at the beginning, the library card design featuring the bears, designed by local artist Astrid Sheckels, is the most popular. People cheer up when presented with the choice of the bears, by my informal survey working at the circulation desk. I’m a little bit of a cynic at heart, so it’s a nice surprise. Until next time, may you use your cards often and well!

I’ll leave you with a little inspiration. . .

When I think of publicity, visions of Hollywood grandeur dance before my eyes. Fancy dresses, shiny cars, red carpets—and an army of P.R. people with phones glued to their ears, orchestrating everything behind the scenes. Of course, the illusion I envision is its own kind of publicity, the kind that makes misunderstood teenagers hitchhike their way across the country to follow their dreams of stardom.

Nobody’s hitchhiking from California or Oregon to the GPL to become a librarian, at last report. Our publicity isn’t that good. But the GPL marketing team does deserve a shout out, and you deserve the lifting of the proverbial curtain on what they do. The team (almost everyone on staff plays a part, as everyone wears many hats) is one of the engines powering the library. Without marketing and its resulting publicity, we’d have empty programs:

· Unread books and nonexistent discussions for book clubs

· No audiences for author readings

· No one eager to learn how to creatively mend or

· To learn to test soil or

· To learn how to navigate the internet safely with children

Since libraries exist to serve people, we need to get information about what we’re offering to patrons in a timely, effective manner. Let’s start with definitions, because you may be like me, who once upon a time believed that publicity and marketing were interchangeable words.

Turns out, marketing is “the overarching, strategic process of identifying user needs and promoting services.” Publicity “is a specific tool within marketing, often focused on earning media coverage to boost visibility.”

Let’s get into the nitty gritty of how our marketing actually operates.

Marketing for a given month begins when an individual who shall remain nameless creates a master document listing all our programs, events, and exhibits. She creates this document by collating the submissions of librarians from the teen, children’s, information services, circulation, and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink departments for their events of the upcoming month.

Once the document is finalized, it is used to create outgoing and in-house publicity. In-house publicity might take the form of the paper calendar of events available at the circulation and reference desks, or the continually looping program of events on the big screen near the circulation desk.

Outgoing publicity can take shape in a number of forms: Constant Contact, CitySpark, our Substacks, our blog, our newsletter, our social media, and even word of mouth.

• Constant Contact is an email service which allows you to send out batches of emails to interested participants. We could potentially alert the GPL subscribers to an event they might be interested in, or (see below) send them the newsletter. (Once again, for emphasis: this email service only goes out to people who have asked to participate in it.)

• CitySpark can be thought of as a big online calendar of events. We input all of the data about our programs, and the media pull from CitySpark for information for their output.

• Substacks: GPL has three active Substacks. A Substack is a newsletter delivered to email subscribers, or readable on the web. Our active Substacks are the one you’re reading now, “On the Same Page,” “focusing on spreading the word about GPL events, programs, and library achievements” and The Haunted Pulpit, where you can “join Jeremiah as he explores the dark corners of history, literature, and the human psyche.”

• The blog is described as a “great place to learn about library events, discover new books, and explore the resources the library offers.” Often posts focus on five books on a particular theme, or recipes that accompany this month’s Spice Club offering.

• The newsletter is put out monthly, with a focus on programming. It’s emailed to subscribers via Constant Contact.

• Social media: We’re using several platforms:

  • Instagram

  • Facebook for the general library

  • Facebook for the children’s room

  • TikTok for the teens

• Word of Mouth: Our teen librarian Francesca has said that some of her most successful publicity has been achieved through hitting the pavement and sharing the word person to person about a particular event. Sometimes the old fashioned methods work best!

You may have noticed that several of these sources are sharing similar, if not the same, information. The goal is to reach patrons in many different ways. If you don’t read the blog, you might look at our Facebook page, or subscribe to the newsletter.

Technically, the blog, the Substacks, Facebook and Instagram are all social media, but I wanted to put a bullet point between Meta and non-Meta sources.

As I start to input events into CitySpark, submit author information to the Massachusetts Center for the Book events calendar, and learn more from other librarians about what they do in this realm, I realize that there is much more to our marketing than I’ve covered here.

But this is how I look at it, if you’ll excuse a clumsy analogy between publicity and cars: I know very little about cars. Propping open the hood and examining the engine, I marvel at the machinery but can’t distinguish one piece from another. But I bet you that if I worked at a garage, a year from now, I’d be wielding a wrench, tinkering away.

Until next time, I leave you with the coolest car on the block—the vintage Mustang.

Behind the scenes at GPL, many things happen which are above my paygrade. Some of these things I never see, and some of these things I am privy to glimpses of. The library is engaged in a strategic planning project, and it’s something that I participate in to a degree along with my coworkers, in workshops and through online questionnaires and now via a super cool project my supervisor came up with.

But playing a part in this cool project made me take a step back and think about what’s behind the scenes for me. I mean, the premise of this Substack is a behind the scenes look at the GPL, but I am not the head honcho. I am not even a mid-level honcho. So much of what goes on here is to some to degree hidden from me as well.

I suppose I could put on my spy costume and start trying to learn the goings-on above my paygrade. But honestly, I feel like I’m getting my fill of drama just listening to the guy with the barking dog (that he insists is a service dog), who commanders the lounge and verbally abuses any staff who try to talk to him.

I try to share things that are interesting about the GPL, but what about the stuff that I don’t know about? And that even if I did know about, I probably shouldn’t talk about? For example, we have a consultant who is helping with the process of the strategic planning project, working closely with the director. I’m not going to be sitting in on meetings between the two of them. But even if I were, it might not be advisable for me to come here and share the details, right?

It’s a little mind-blowing if you stop to think about all the things you don’t even know you don’t know. Maybe that’s a sophomoric philosophical observation, and I shouldn’t forget the Dunning-Krueger effect and all that, but if I let myself focus on it for long enough, the world of what I don’t know feels ginormous. Even the unknown world of the GPL feels huge. It’s overwhelming, but not in a bad way. It’s humbling, like looking at this image of Earth.

Now back to the strategic planning and the Very Cool Project. Jeremiah (my supervisor) had the idea to present a brief slideshow on library trends of the next 5 years or so to the committee of community members who will be involved in the planning process. And while the creation of the strategic plan process will last almost a year, it will generate a five year plan to guide GPL.

I emphasize this time frame only to underline the fact that I’m still trying to wrap my head around being involved (and engaged!) with a process that takes so long and doesn’t result in something concrete, like a baby. For real, you could have a baby in the time it takes to create a strategic plan. It results in something important that lots of brains will use to guide how our organization can progress into the future, but you can’t see it or touch it. And that sort of idea rubs up against the “unknown that you don’t even know about” for me.

I think that the Very Cool Project of the brief slideshow of library trends is riveting. I’ve spent a lot of time reading through this ALA report: https://www.ala.org/future/trends, and was fascinated by literally every trend. However, after a short while it dawned on me that this report was not of the here and now. My colleague Jesse tracked down the cite, and we realized that the report was published in 2014. So, take it was a grain of salt if you check it out.

I did my slide on basic income. Take a look:

Tarah’s Slide: Basic Income

https://www.ala.org/future/trends/basicincome

• A.I.’s projected devastating impact on the income of members of various strata of society by eliminating jobs (even of librarians?) will lead to the need for guaranteed “basic” income

• Even setting aside the future impact of A.I., many of GPL’s patrons would currently benefit from a guaranteed source of income

• Basic income would change the landscape of how people’s time is spent

• The elimination of psychological energy spent in “survival mode” might convert non-program and resource utilizing patrons into active users

• The library would play an even more important role in fulfilling the need for a space for “teaching, learning” and “productive leisure activities”

I believe strongly that universal basic income is essential to ensuring that everyone enjoys equal human rights. If we all have access to food, shelter, education, childcare, health care, leisure time—I’m undoubtedly leaving some basic rights out, but you get my drift—we ‘d be that much closer to living as equally as possible.

The library is a cornerstone to equal access to information in an age of vast inequity. Try to imagine how much more the library would mean in an age of equality. The cynical might say that our unhoused patrons and our lower income patrons would flee the library to enjoy their newfound income in their own spaces.

I think that people who were highly focused on how to survive on a day-to-day basis may become some of the library’s most engaged patrons in a new way. They are already familiar with spending lots of time with the library and interacting with library staff. They may well look to the library to fulfill information needs that evolve during their newfound leisure time.

I might be engaging in a furious flight of the imagination. It’s hard in this era of war, economic stresses and political upheaval to imagine something as utopian as basic income coming to pass. Perhaps the members of the Greenfield community will reject it out of hand when presented with this possible trend for the future. Or maybe a seed will be planted for the future.

Until next time, what library trend would you predict influencing Greenfield’s future five years from now?

Greetings on the eve of several holidays—Valentine’s Day, if you’re celebrating, and the President’s Day long weekend, which I hope you get to celebrate. Today’s post is not about love or politics, however. But uur subject has something in common with both, in that there are ups and downs, highs and lows, bumps and smooth patches in the story I’m about to tell you.

Good news—we’re about to explore the wide world of librarian professional development, which is multi-faceted and multitudinous and multiplying as we speak. Bad news—I have a difficult personal confession to make about my engagement with said world.

Professional development (here on out referred to as PD) is a challenge that I struggle with. Not because I don’t want to further develop my skills as a librarian. I do! And not because I’m adverse to anything reminiscent of school. From preschool through college, and then through three graduate degrees, I’ve always been a fan of learning.

Here’s the truth: what challenges me about PD is social anxiety. Wait, what? You might think to yourself. What do the two things have to do with each other? I promise, I’ll get there. For me, engaging with PD is both scary and full of growth potential. It’s kind of like forcing myself to eat my vegetables, except maybe in that Popeye eats spinach and gains bulging muscles way? When I mustered up the courage to take a PD course, I thought, okay, I can get behind that. Bulging librarian brain muscles! Excellent.

I began by brainstorming areas I wanted to avoid. Sometimes it’s easier to knock off the list what you don’t want to do. I wanted to learn new things, so even though I was attracted to offerings about children’s literature, my background in children’s and youth lit and services made me shy away from these opportunities.

Now, where to find my professional development seminar? There are ample offerings for librarians in Massachusetts, and I receive notifications to my inbox near daily from:

• The Massachusetts Library (or MLS)

• The Public Library Association (PLA)

• The Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (or MBLC)

• Additionally, our library director, Anna, is excellent about communicating to staff opportunities for us to further our skills

Just to give you an idea of the breadth of offerings out there: there’s the grand poohbah of conferences, the annual American Library Association meeting. This year’s conference will be held in June in Chicago, marking ALA’s 150^th anniversary. If I didn’t hate large crowds almost as much as I hate large cities, I might be tempted. (And then there’s the social anxiety…) Various other library association also hold conferences:

• The Public Library Association

• The Rare Books and Manuscripts Section

• The Core Forum, among others

Side note: the only conference I’ve ever been to was while I was an M.F.A. student in creative writing. I attended the Modern Language Association meeting in 2009ish, and while it was really cool and I left with a suitcase full of advanced reading copies of books (ARCs), it was a little like going to the fair when you’re a kid—overwhelming fun that leaves you wrung out and sick to your stomach.

Back to PD: in the past week alone:

• the MBLC has offered a training on working with patrons with intellectual and developmental disabilities,

• the PLA held a training on responding to ICE in the library

• MBLC announced a webinar on supporting aging populations.

We librarians are spoiled for choice.

My first foray into PD was a seminar in June 2025 at the MLS office in the town where I live. The subject, diversity in collections, is one that I both believe in, have experience studying, and wanted to learn more about. Sounds great, right? We started off with an icebreaker, sharing our favorite books from childhood. Should’ve been an easy one. But my social anxiety reared its ugly head.

Between my poor memory and my desire not to repeat a book already listed, I had an inner mini-meltdown. I was nervous, sweaty, and waited until everyone else had gone before I worked up the courage to speak. It was also at this point that I realized the focus of the course was on children’s literature, which left me slightly crestfallen. I was geared up to strengthen my knowledge about diversity in adult collections. But no matter—the principles I would learn would be useful and applicable for adults.

Next came the meat of the course, the slideshow, which I loved and took copious notes on. There were statistics about representations of marginalized groups in picture books, tracking changes over the past forty years. There were breakdowns of the nature of the main character in these books by category—white kid, animal, and kid of color/minority religion/neurodivergence/other category.

In case you’re wondering, animals are the main character category, followed very closely by white kids. The instructor introduced the concept of the diversity audit, which involves examining your collection for the incorporation of a wide range of experiences and voices. All exciting stuff!

But inevitably, the slideshow came with breaks. Bathroom breaks, hydration breaks, get up and stretch your legs break. Breaks, you see, involve small talk with strangers.

Now, I can muster up some on-the-fly banter when I’m working at the circulation desk. Not grade A, smooth talking, never met a stranger kind of banter. More like a stilted back-and-forth that’s friendly, if at times a little awkward. That’s me in my comfort zone. Take me out from behind the desk and plop me down in a conference room, and I reverted a handful of decades back to the shy, anxious child I once was.

I’d like to say I transformed from a caterpillar into a social butterfly over the next few hours that day last June, but I’d be lying. I can confirm that I spoke to several people, including the instructor. But most importantly, I made my first foray into the world of professional development.

Some days when my colleagues are going off to conferences or are making the most of the webinars, seminars, and courses of the library world, I get down on my self for not having grand plans. But most days, I remember that we all move at our own pace. I’m scheduled to watch a webinar on front line workers in the coming days, and that’s a step in the right direction.

Please share in the comments your own internal victories, no matter how small they may seem. And happy Valentine’s Day and President’s Day!

Let’s talk about displays. The humble, ever present, book display. I know. You might be thinking, what’s the big deal? They’re books. Sitting on bookshelves. Or maybe, if we’re getting fancy, on a table. Am I really going to talk about book displays for an entire Substack post?

Let me share with you a little secret.

A display is the superhero in disguise of the library, the Clark Kent that reveals himself as Superman only to the librarian. And now, I’m unmasking the display for you.

Some of our most recent displays include cookbooks from fictional worlds such as Lord of the Rings, Studio Ghibli and Bluey, staff picks from 2025 accompanied by snappy two-line reviews, and books that focus on body positivity for the new year.

All well and good, very interesting really, but what’s so secret about them? Displays don’t just serve up books on handy little easels that make them look appealing. That’s their functional, just the facts, book disguise.

There’s more than meets the eye here. Displays serve lots of different purposes, from the utilitarian function of providing the texts for book club readers, to the arrangement intended to provide exposure to stimulating books and themes.

Ta-Da!

But here’s the superhero part: a display is a program hiding in plain sight in the midst of the library.

There’s calculation behind virtually every aspect of displays. They’re passive programming located in prime real estate in the library. (Passive programs are self-directed by the patron, allowing the patron to engage how and when they want, and not at a time dictated by and led by a librarian.)

The positioning of many of the displays on the first floor of the GPL often helps books get checked out by patrons that might otherwise never make the trek up to a particular section of the stacks on the second floor. I’m thinking in particular of our American poetry display this past fall.

That part of the collection, in the 811 section upstairs towards the back of the stacks, requires a deliberate effort to peruse. But a display on the main floor requires little effort to engage with. Everyone deserves to enjoy the joys of poetry, and it helps when you’re able to pluck a volume off a shelf right by the front desk.

Theme

So how do your librarians decide how to create these passive programs? They often start with a theme.

There are several categories that display themes are often drawn from. The American Library Association, or ALA, generates a number of themes every year that libraries generate ideas around. For examples, ALA’s National Library Week theme for 2026 is “Find Your Joy.” Display ideas will be brainstormed to figure out how to “celebrate libraries as places for joy, confidence, connection, and essential resources.”

Holidays and seasons are thematic mainstays that are often drawn upon. We strive to offer a new take on these occasions, whether it be the changing of a season or Black History Month. Last year, for Black History Month, we focused on the new titles of the past two years that had been added to the collection.

Finally, there’s the “individual interest” category a librarian dreams up. For example, some of my miscellaneous displays in the past were “fall into poetry” and “craftivism.”

Book Selection

After a theme is settled upon, the question of book selection is next on the list in creating a book display. Of course, it’s always possible to select a book or several and create a display around them. But displays often seem to lead with theme and follow with book selection. And what a great part of the process selection is!

It often starts with searching the catalogue for the items that will be part of the display, and librarians love a good search. Since there’s a lot of choice available within the CW/MARS catalogue, it can be tempting to fall down a rabbit hole when searching a broad thematic category like humor, as I did for a recent display. But oddly enough, the more I found, the pickier I became about finding the exactly right books that would cover a broad range of humorous tastes. I ended up selecting four titles that represented different types of comedic writing, from a “grumpy cat” (see above) to a Generation Z voice.

Once the book selection has been finalized, it’s time to request enough books to populate the display for however long I intend for it to be up. Usually, our displays run for a month at a time. An easy default number of books to request is ten, although depending on the display, the number required may be many more. The benefit of keeping track of how many books you request is that you then know how many books circulate, and that’s a good measure of how successful your display/passive program is.

Flyer

After the choice of theme and book title takes place, we set about designing an interesting flyer that will attract the patron’s attention. We use a graphic design program called Canva, which is a great resource that is intuitive to use. Canva is used throughout the library for virtually all our visual resources. Some display themes, like the seasonal or those focusing on a holiday, are pretty easy to design a flyer around (see above). Other more abstract themes, like the fictional world cookbooks, are a bit trickier.

Book Clubs

We’ve been dealing quite a bit with the standalone book display, but the book displays linked to active programming deserve their fair due. Librarians work just as hard to select books that will appeal to readers for book clubs, which is no small feat considering how broad the audience is for our “non-fiction” or fictional “literary tea” themed groups. In addition, Pamela and Lisa, who run these groups, must create attractive graphics that work across a variety of mediums, such as social media, print, and the scrolling screen in the lobby.

You Know You Want To…

We come back to where we started, looking at an attractive flyer heading a series of rows of books united by a theme. The books are positioned temptingly within reach as you enter or exit the building. Much like a candy bar situated at eye level as you pass through a supermarket checkout line, the books demand your attention. But at the library, it’s for good, not for evil. Give in to the temptation and try a display book today. After all, it’s a superhero in disguise!

I’m knee deep in the biography section, weeding away. More specifically, I’m indoors, at the very back of the stacks, armed with a book cart, a twenty-seven-page report, various pens and markers, a ruler, sticky notes, and of course access to my trusty computer. But what I’m doing feels like it bears more than a passing resemblance to kneeling in the dirt, digging scrubby green weeds out from between the roots of a beautiful bed of irises. Or day lilies. You get to pick the flower in this analogy.

To me, weeding in nature and weeding in a library have a lot of similarities: both require you to be carefully selective, you must get down in the dirt and become one with nature (or literature, as it were), and the project can seem endless. I’ve been spending a fair amount of time carefully combing through our biographies to evaluate, in consultation with our collection policy, which biographies should stay, and which should go.

I want to make a few things clear from the offset about the library weeding process. I’m going to borrow Claire Sewell’s use of a quote that defines weeding. “According to the American Library Association (ALA):

Weeding or the deselection of material is critical to collection maintenance and involves the removal of resources from the collection. All materials are considered for weeding based on accuracy, currency, and relevancy. Space limitations, edition, format, physical condition, and number of copies are considered when evaluating physical materials.”

These are the guiding principles that I’m using as I make my way through our collection. My tone in this post is lighthearted, but there’s an underlying framework to the choices I’m making to ensure that our library has the best collection possible.

And to clarify, when I mentioned that I’m choosing which biographies “go,” I mean that the books that are removed from the collection become part of our semi-annual book sales. Part of the standard weeding criteria that librarians use is to remove volumes that are in poor physical condition. I’m happy to report that none of the biographies in our GPL collection have been in such a state!

Now that I’ve got that clarified, a confession--I have a love/hate relationship with weeding. One of the difficulties of weeding is that as a book lover, I find it easy to see a title through rose-tinted glasses. I’ll picture the moment that even the worst book, about even the most obscure and irrelevant subject, that hasn’t been checked out in eleventeen years, finds its reader. And then that reader recommends it to someone else, which sets off a domino effect, until that once sad book can proudly stand in the ranks of the most popular memoirs or biographies, like Tara Westover’s Educated or Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air.

It’s more difficult for me to acknowledge that a particular biography is no longer useful to our collection, and that its circulation and usage don’t justify its place here. Perhaps this is due to some latent book hoarding compulsion that compels me to want our collection to have as many volumes as possible! Or maybe I’m just really a fan of the underdog. Whatever the case, as I wrote in my last post, I love buying books. Culling them is a little harder. I suspect I’m not the only librarian that feels this way.

So why weed it if it’s so hard? Because just like that flower bed of tall purple flowers needs to be cleaned out before its roots get choked, our library’s collection of materials will be less useful, current and attractive if we don’t consistently tend to it. Ok, I really flogged that analogy to death!

I want to share with you the secrets of what makes a bad biography. Sometimes librarians can be a little defensive of the books they’ve bought. After all, money has been invested, time and judgement have been expended. It can be hard to see a book you’ve selected on the chopping block. But we’re forced to practice a little detachment in the weeding process. I’ve found there are roughly six categories of bad biographies in our collection. Some ways in which these books are “bad” are obvious, some complicated. All of them reveal something about us as readers.

An interesting side note--while the circulation statistics I’ll be discussing are reflective of GPL and its readers, the statistical trends of our library are also reflective of broader trends in our region. Throughout CW/MARS, our library network or consortium, which has a mixture of much larger and much smaller libraries than the GPL, strikingly similar circulation tendencies can be seen. Let’s delve into what makes a biography unpopular, and how we make the decision to weed a title—or move it to another section of the library.

1. Memoirs of Political Figures

The first category of bad biography is memoirs of political figures from the past. A few examples of biographies we’ve had in our collection come to mind: Michael Cohen, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Susan Rice. While they may have played prominent roles in the past, library patrons aren’t clamoring to read their stories now. The window of interest in these politicians is vanishingly narrow: during and immediately after their political tenure.

To pick on Sanders for a moment, her memoir Speaking for Myself: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House was released in 2020 but has never made it into the double digits in circulation numbers at any of the CW/MARS libraries. Virtually all the checkouts of her book occurred in 2020. At the GPL, we “weed,” or remove from our collection, books according to a proscribed set of criteria. Among those criteria are books that aren’t circulating. The works of Cohen, Sanders, and Rice all met this criterion.

2. Hybrid Cultural Histories

And now for something completely different: our second category is hybrid cultural histories disguised as or categorized as biographies. Perhaps readers don’t expect to be reading broad, wide-reaching stories when they check out these works, or perhaps these stories don’t hang together as well as a biography on a single figure does. Let’s get specific.

Some examples of books in this category include: Like Water: a Cultural History of Bruce Lee, by Daryl Maeda, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the MeToo Movement by Tarana Burke, a personal account intertwined with a general overview of the #MeToo movement, and The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library, whose title speaks for itself. All very cool subjects, none of which particularly seem like biographies. We reclassified and found homes for these books in other sections of our non-fiction collection.

3. Works Telling a Bigger Story

Sometimes works are initially classified as biography, because they seem to fit the definition. But on further reflection, these works tell a bigger story than the events of one person’s life. Distinct from the hybrid cultural history, these works of literary history contain many elements of the biography but ultimately act as a record of a period in the life of two or more people. An excellent example from the GPL collection is Zora and Langston: a Story of Friendship and Betrayal, by Yuval Taylor. This intriguing 2019 title only circulated 9 times as a biography, but our cataloger Jesse has moved the work to the non-fiction literature section, where we are all hopeful it will find more readers.

4. Celebrity Memoirs

Category number four is a guilty pleasure. Or we can just dispense with the guilt and simply call them a pleasure. Celebrity memoirs blaze brightly and briefly, again resulting in overall low circulation numbers. You may have your doubts about this truism. What about Prince Harry’s memoir? What about Britney Spears’? These are the exceptions that prove the rule: Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me and Prince Harry’s Spare continue to circulate, yet the pace is much less frenetic than it was when they first were released.

Less well-known celebrities, such as Gabrielle Union and her memoir You Got Anything Stronger? and Constance Wu’s Making a Scene or celebrities of an older generation, such as Julie Andrews and her Home Work: a Memoir of My Hollywood Years tend to have their books circulate a handful of times when they are first released. Then, they languish on the shelf until some merciful librarian comes along, removes them from the collection, and saves them for the semi-annual book sale.

5. Highly Specific or Personal Stories that Lack Universality

The next category is highly specific or personal stories that lack universality. The average person is often bored by the anecdotes of her nearest and dearest, tuning out when her sweetheart starts to delve into the details of his latest conversation with his sibling. Now imagine being regaled for four hundred pages by a complete stranger about the minute details of a 10,000-mile horseback race she undertook on a total whim in her twenties. This book by Lisa Prior-Palmer had a great title--Rough Magic—but it didn’t circulate.

Or consider The Milkman’s Son by Randy Lindsay. This was the story of a son discovering that the man who raised him was not his biological father. Perhaps at one point in time this story may have been shocking or novel, but today it’s commonplace. Unfortunately, because the memoir didn’t tell the story in a compelling or emotionally captivating manner, it didn’t capture the reading imagination of the GPL patron.

6. Biographies that Aren’t All They’re Cracked Up to Be

Category six isn’t mind-blowing, but it needs to be included: biographies that aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. No matter how hard we try to select the best and the brightest biographies and memoirs based on the review sources available to us, sometimes they turn out to be duds. Readers are savvy, and if a story isn’t engaging, it will languish on the shelf. Of course, taste is very personal. And I’m the first person to put a hold on some seriously entertaining schlock.

And now I’ll take my weeding hat off and take a spin around the library on my book cart, careening around the comfy chairs and narrow stacks of the upper floor. I hope you enjoyed this latest trip on The Runaway Book Cart. We got a little more serious and nitty-gritty in our look behind the scenes today, so I’ll leave you with a cheesy librarian joke:

How do libraries make sure novels stay warm?

They give them book jackets.

Until next time, see you around the library!

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I’m looking for you, out there on the other side of the internet. We’re kindred spirits, even if we don’t know each other yet. Let me tell you a little about yourself.

You use your library card so often you’ve memorized the number—and you probably keep it safer than your credit card. You proudly sport the hats, the tote bags, and the t-shirts from your favorite libraries, turning every grocery run into a silent pro-literacy rally. You volunteer, devoting countless hours to helping your library thrive (and maybe occasionally rescuing a misplaced romance from the cookbook section).

And don’t think I’ve forgotten the newcomers—just as welcome and valuable—who got your first cards last month, last week, or even yesterday. I’m talking to all of you wonderful people who love your libraries. And if a couple of the randomly curious happen to find your way here too, cool.

Welcome to The Runaway Book Cart, ready to whisk you behind the circulation desk to learn the inner workings of the library. I’m here to reveal the juicy stuff! Ever wonder how books are selected and cataloged? How they get processed and repaired (sometimes after a toddler with a crayon gets a hold of one)? Are you curious about the roles of the department heads (and who controls the temperature settings)? What technology powers our e-books? Or what about a breakdown of the library budget and upcoming strategic goals? Watch this space for the answers to these questions and more.

Let’s get started with one of my absolute favorite parts of the job: book selection. This is a topic that’s very exciting to me, and I hope to impart some of that enthusiasm to you!

Way back in the days of my youth, Scholastic gave me my first real taste of ordering books. Maybe you can relate--every so often in elementary school, the teacher would hand out a paper form covered with little pictures of book covers, organized in a grid to fill out with your selections. I’d luxuriate in the agony of selecting between boxes up to my budget limit, then erasing so I could choose all over again. I’d hand in my form at the last minute and wait what felt like an agonizingly long amount of time for the books to arrive. Book selection as a librarian isn’t all that different.

Surely there must be a huge difference between ordering books for yourself and ordering them for all the patrons of your library, though? Not necessarily. A wise librarian once told me, “Don’t run from your biases. Lean into them.” Or words to that effect. Now, if I was the only person buying books for the library I work for, leaning into my biases could be a little problematic. There’d be no new books on anything related to math or science, and I’d buy every Gothic thriller that came out. Luckily, there’s a team of people selecting titles for the library I work at. My patch of ground is fiction. And I’m not the only person selecting fiction. What does that allow me to do? You guessed it! Lean into my biases.

I’m partial to literary fiction, mysteries and thrillers, and the odd fantasy novel. So, when I’m looking for books to buy for the months to come, I’m free to follow my instincts about what will be a good read, what will be interesting and compelling, what will grab a patron when she’s standing in front of the display of new books reading the blurb inside one of the shiny fresh covers. The other side of the coin is that my colleagues and I strive for diversity in selection. What does that look like in practice? Basically, it means that although I have my favorite types of books, I try to choose works that reflect a wide range of characters, voices, and experiences.

Another aspect of selection that might be surprising is that contrary to the old adage, librarians do judge a book by its cover. If a book’s cover is unappealing, no one will take it home with them (a.k.a. borrow it). If a book doesn’t get borrowed, then it won’t have a home at the library for very long. At least at our library, space is at a premium, and each book must justify the amount of shelf space it takes up by circulating (or being taken out). We can’t keep a copy of every book, as much as we might like to. Long story short, part of the selection process is judging a book by its’ cover.

On to the nitty-gritty level of book selection. Let me list several pertinent facts: ordering is done online. We use a vendor called Ingram. The interface can best be described as “clunky,” as one of my colleagues termed it. We create “carts,” or lists for each month. We select the books and fill the carts according to selection criteria and budget. At our library, we pay to have the books processed by Ingram, which means that the vendor does things like put protective covers on the books, sticks spine labels on them, and places identification tags in them.

Next time on The Runaway Book Cart, we’ll go behind the scenes to lift the curtain on another intriguing library topic. Until then, feel free to comment, question, disagree—and of course, keep reading!

This is Tarah's Substack.

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