Ukulele: Starting a Circulating Collection

At the end of August 2017, I made a proposal to start a small circulating collection of ukuleles at my library. We finally got everything together and ready to go in February of 2018 and it has been a big hit so far! I'm hoping the collection maintains its popularity. I know many libraries have circulating ukulele collections, but I wasn't able to find a lot of information online about how they got their collections started. Fortunately, I was able to get some advice and assistance from a number of people from the Librarians with Ukes Facebook group which really helped me out! I wanted to pass on some of what I learned so I can hopefully help anyone else who is wanting to start a collection too.

My proposal focused on three main questions: why, what, and how? Those are the questions I would encourage yourself when you are thinking about starting a collection of your own.

Click read more for more information about the whys, whats, and hows for starting a circulating ukulele collection.

Happy Read Across America Day!

I often make clothes to go with my storytime themes or for different library programs and events. Today is normally my day off, but I agreed to go over to the local elementary school to read to a couple different classes for their celebrations today. I had to stay up until nearly 2:00 am to get this dress finished in time, but it was worth it!

I've been meaning to post more pictures of my fun themed outfits, but I usually forget to snap pictures while I'm at work. I got a coworker to take one of my Dr Seuss themed dress today though! I wanted to hold a Seuss book for the picture, but all of the ones in our English collection were checked out, so I grabbed a Spanish one. Sadly, my Spanish skills are not anywhere near the level they would need to be to read this book out loud or run a Spanish storytime.

The dress is made from a variety of Seuss-themed quilting cottons. It's even lined with a white fabric that has Seuss book titles on it. I used Simplicity 1873 for the bodice pattern, but the skirt is just gathered rectangles. The dress also feature sizable pockets in the side seams of the skirt, also made from the white book title fabric.

Hopefully in the future I'll post more of my thematically appropriate outfits to this blog. I've made quite a few so far, but just haven't gotten good pictures of them. Originally my goal was to post pictures of those along with my storytime write ups, hence the lookbook part of my blog name!