When I left Springfield, I had at least 15 copies each of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Soloist and Unbroken lying around.  A few copies of each were on the shelves; many more were crowded on the bottom shelves in our workroom, several copies deep.

What do we do with the leftover books after our One-Book-One-School / One-Book-One-Community or major book club events have passed?

And, if you are planning an event, how can you gather enough copies to ensure that your community can participate in these reading culture building activities without worrying about gathering enough copies? We were lucky to able to get grants from our PTO and Foundation. We also used paperback trading sites and interlibrary loan to avoid waste and to facilitate access.

But there’s gotta be a better way.

Enter Steve.  I’ll let him tell the story of his solution.

A librarian-powered volunteer effort to help spread bookclub materials across schools and district. It’s incumbent on those who participate to work out the logistics of how they will transport the materials from place to place.

So, if you have a bunch of books to share, or if you need a bunch of books for a book club meeting or one-book-one-school or district event, use the hashtag

#bookclubshare

and visit either:

http://bookclubshare.com or http://bookclubshare.org

Steve shared his reflection:

“I Made A Thing!”: Translating Librarian Thoughts Into Practical Library Tools

While in a workshop session to discuss building a culture of reading in schools, the gathered librarians started to discuss their work with book clubs. Several discussed how they had large collections of book club materials sitting in storage rooms; they wished there was a way to exchange with other schools and librarians, but their experiences trying to utilize the interlibrary loan system was mostly not great for this particular project.

It seemed to me that the basic idea was pretty straight-forward – what was needed was a shared document where people could list what they had, and look to see what other people were offering. While the discussion went on, I threw together a Google Spreadsheet, set the permissions so anyone who visited it could add information to it, and made a Bitly.com shortened link so it would be easy for people to find online. I dubbed it the Interschool Library Loan Sheet, threw a short explanation of what it was and how it worked at the top, and made sure the bit-link was on there.

As the conversation about the problems with the ILL wrapped up, I threw my spreadsheet up on the projection screen. “Would something like this work?” I asked, as I pointed out the features. People seemed pretty responsive to the idea.

I was glad I was able to take the general concept expressed by my future colleagues and turn it into a usable tool. The beauty of this kind of open resource is that it’s open to iteration and improvement as people try it out and learn what’s helpful and what’s not in doing this kind of exchange.

In the perfect world, I’d have the time and resources to put together a larger scale and more responsive resource exchange – a Craigslist for educational materials that librarians and teachers could use to get rid of the things they no longer need and find new items that they can utilize.

The #BookClubShare site was created by teacher and prospective school library media specialist Steve Tetreault, with encouragement and advice from Professor Joyce Valenza. It is intended to be a free platform for libraries and schools to share book club materials. Use for any other purposes is prohibited. Participants use this site on their own recognizance; site administrator takes no responsibility for issues that arise from use of site.
The features of this site function best with Google Chrome (browser) and Google Docs.

Note: A project like this needs to develop a bit of steam, or critical mass, before it can fly. Please help us get started by loading your lists of titles that have been lying around waiting to find homes.