Beautifying the library space is always something that is in the back of my mind. I have visions for projects to make our children’s library “feel as magical as Disneyland”, but then life comes in. And patrons. And books that need to be shelved. And programs that need to be planned for. But this project is one that I was able to finish, and it was surprisingly cost efficient to complete.

I found this image online of the Dewey Decimal System explained in images and knew it was what we wanted to have in our room over our non-fiction bookcases. After a little bit of poking about online I was able to locate the designer of the images as Maggie Appleton and sent her note. She was incredibly gracious to write back:

Whoop! I was excited all day! The Librarian Edge blog Maggie referred me to had all the images ready to download along with beautiful photos of what they look like in a library. I called a local print shop and asked how much it would cost to print each image as a poster. They told me all I needed to do for the posters was to convert each image to a pdf file and email it to them, which I used Publisher to do. For $0.75 I was able to print each poster as a 12″ x 18″ in full color.

Here is a photo of the posters we had in the library before this week. They had been there for the past ten years.

And here is what our space looks like now!

But, one good idea leads to another! I found another post on Katie Day’s blog about Library Signage on her Resources, Etc. page. Katie had uploaded links for the slides of a presentation she and Barb Reid completed on library signage. I feel in love with this image and would love to make this happen in our picture book collection if possible!