As the student’s “back to school” season draws to a close, some of the teachers and administration never really had one. One perfect example of this is Librarian Shannon Chamberlain and her new changes she made to the library.
The leftmost shelves this year are packed with books, while last year they only held about half of what they do now. The extra books came from the back shelf, which now contains boxed up laptops. Chamberlain’s mother, Alice Haliano, also assisted with the daunting task of moving, reorganizing and putting on new stickers on the books. There were, however, challenges.
“My mom and I had to keep coming back because we were running out of room. Then we would have an entire two or three genres left, and then were like we’re not going enough room for these. Then we had to shift everything, squish everything back in and make it fit in smaller spaces which was hard. I think we shifted four times in total,” Chamberlain said.
One of the most notable changes was the library being organized differently. Originally it was under the Dewey Decimal system, which all of the genres have their own number in the hundreds. Any number after the hundreds places narrows down the differences in the books even more.
“I understand you guys didn’t get a chance to learn how Dewey is organized, because I did teach in elementary library. I realized I didn’t get a chance to do that even though I wanted to. I realized you guys didn’t have that background knowledge and teaching everyone individually was too much,” Chamberlain said.
Consequently, it was sometimes thought that the library was just an endless maze of knowledge, with no rhyme or reason in its outdated organization. Now, the library system is still organized by genre; the only difference now is its color coded. While all the stickers on the books used to just be white, they now range from fluorescent pink to light purple. Above the shelves there is now a framed genre title to also help with navigating the library.
“That one [the genre chart] I made on Canva. I wanted something simple and colorful. I am very much about simple; I feel simplicity is important when you’re trying to give a lot of information to somebody without overwhelming them. The ones above, the genre frame my husband designed all of those. We talked about images that represented the genre,” Chamberlain said.
In addition to this, a new rule has been added to the library: the knocking rule. Now if students want to come into the library they must knock. This introduces a new responsibility for Chamberlain.
“For me personally it takes up a lot of my focus just sitting down and writing an email is very hard because I’m constantly looking up into the window. I feel very distracted,” Chamberlain said. “As far as my library goes, it feels very unwelcoming to students. I understand it’s there for safety, but it goes against my whole everyone is safe in the library.”
Some students share a similar view. “It’s normally been an open space so it’s really awkward to just knock on the door and say hey I’m just here to just sit and chill and do my it doesn’t feel as open to chill,” Jordan Borst (’26) said.
The last recent change that was made to the library was not being able to eat lunch there anymore. This change was made to keep students in the lunch room so they could be easily found.
“I enjoyed eating it the library it was quiet and I could do my work while I was eating and it was way to loud in the lunchroom,” Borst said.
As far as new plans for the library, Chamberlain currently doesn’t have many and is open for students to give suggestions.
