Picturing America for Public Libraries

Each children's librarian developed a program-7 in total and each presented a program a month to elementary age children from Sept-May. These programs included making a dreamcatcher, a quilt program, making a paper stain glass window, a poetry program featuring the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, a program on courage featuring Lincoln, recreating the Boston Tea Party, architecture program featuring a bridge craft, chalk program to draw your neighborhood and showing City Scape, The Dove and Allies Day, various speakers including someone from the Quilt Museum, Native American storyteller, an American folksinger, a poet, a speaker from the Audubon society, and a photographer. Some of our libraries have book clubs and used the posters as a backdrop in their discussions of books which included Esperanza Rising with Migrant Mother, Liberation of Gabriel King with some of the Black American art, and one library did a "A Lesson for Felicity" bookclub and "Revolutionary War on Wednesday" bookclub.
Santa Clara County Library has 7 community libraries and we displayed the posters primarily in the Children's Rooms. Some had them in their Program Rooms during the times they were doing their programs or set up in a special area when they were also being used to feature a book display as well. Depending on the size of the library, either all or a few at a time were on display. They were sometimes grouped around a theme or holiday. For example, during the presidential campaign, one library had several of the posters grouped around the theme of "Cast Your Vote" along side election books and booklists. During our Community Reads One Book month featuring a Black American author, we featured posters around the theme of Black American art. And one clever children's librarian used the poster of Lincoln and added headphones to publicize our Playaway collection--what is Lincoln listening to? And the Playaways were checked out as fast as they could be put on the shelf. We have never received so many compliments from the public than with these posters.

Submitted by Davi Evans