On the weekend of December 8, the Studio Education library formally re-opened to members of our learning community, but our preparations for the re-launch began much earlier.

In June 2018, to respond to our students’ eagerness to use our library, we decided to take advantage of the upcoming summer vacation for our weekend school to organize our library with a new digital system. Such a service makes our library much easier to navigate and books more accessible to all our members.

To start off, we needed our good friend Destiny, the name of our new library management system. Destiny not only allows us to catalog all of our existing books that everyone knows and loves, but also opens a digital portal to our library. Because there are now online records of our collection, people can now hop on online.studio.education/library to quickly search for the resources they’d like to read.

The organization process of our existing collection was arduous at first. Since we have books for all sorts of topics, from philosophy to children’s classics, award-winning picture books to historical commentary, the most important first step was to separate our books into nonfiction and fiction material. This clear divider for book genres would help people more efficiently locate the topics in which they are more interested.

Within the nonfiction collection is a labyrinth of organizations itself. We follow the Dewey decimal classification system as most (if not all) libraries do, which means a three-digit number typically indicates the topic under which different books might fall. The hundreds digit reveals the general subject, and the tens and ones digits tells us more specific information about the books. For example, a book under 599 would be about mammals, because the hundreds-digit 5 refers to science, the tens-digit 9 refers to animals, and the ones-digit 9 refers to mammals. As we go up a classification level of simply 590, the books would be general information about a variety of animals, and books in the category of 500 would simply be about general science. You can find a list of all Dewey decimal topics beside our nonfiction collection at each center as well as labels on the bookshelves that denote each topic.

On the other hand, the fiction collection was easier to arrange. We simply arranged them in alphabetical order by the authors’ last name, and voilà! They’re ready to go.

All books in the Studio Education collection has a stamp on the title page, a stamp on the fifteenth page, a spine label, and a barcode label. Whereas the two stamps are ways for us to verify that the books do in fact belong to us, the two labels help us locate as well as shelve them.

 

After the books were ready to go, we began producing other amenities for our libraries like our book trolley for book returns, shelf markers for browsing, and library cards. Here’s a little secret: we produce library cards in-house. After ordering template cards (shown here) in bulk, we then use an in-house card printer to add each student’s name, unique ID, and a barcode in the blank space to facilitate the check-out process.

If you haven’t already, please visit our new libraries and enjoy what Destiny has to offer! Since we are still in the early stages of our library opening, there are many more exciting things to come in 2018, so stay tuned!

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