Thursday, January 24 and Friday, January 25, the Robinson Media Center will host its annual book swap in the Robinson courtyard during all three lunch periods.

Media specialist Lee Gibbons warns that the swap may have to be canceled on Thursday. “It’s a hundred-percent chance of rain tomorrow… so I don’t know whether I’ll be out there or not,” she said.

Gibbons has run book swaps before in her previous career as a middle school media specialist. In Gibbon’s first year at Robinson, a student working to earn her Gold Award for Girl Scouting came to her with a proposition. “She came up with the idea of joining me in that effort and donating the children’s books that get left over to the Metropolitan Ministries school,” Gibbons said.

Students can donate books that they don’t want to the book swap, and receive credit to pick out an equal number of books to the amount that they donated from the swap. Gibbons will accept books from students year round, not just on the days of the book swap.

“I keep a running spreadsheet of the number of books that students have submitted,” she said “For every book that they bring in, they get to choose a book.”

Gibbons hopes to expand the book swap so that students who have donated books to other drives run by clubs or charities can also participate.

“If they’re in a book donation in SGA I see no reason why they couldn’t have credit for the book swap here,” Gibbons said.

She believes that the primary goal of the book swap is to offer students new books “free of charge,” and she wants students to know that any kind of books are acceptable donations.

“It can be a young adult book, it can be elementary school and it could be the tacky romance novels of the hoarder down the street,” Gibbons said “I’ll accept them all and I’ll figure out where they go from here.”