Analog Delight: Rediscovering the CA Libraries

When you step through the doors of the Lower School Library at Colorado Academy, beneath the giant “Swiftie” beads that spell out “Karma is the LS Library,” it’s highly likely that your gaze will stop on one of the many, many stuffed animals and other creatures that sit atop the bookshelves, line the windowsills, and wait patiently at the circulation desk for customer cuddles. Every child in Pre-K through Grade 5 knows the Library’s Beezus and Ramona, two plush golden retrievers named after Beverly Cleary’s beloved fictional sisters; every reader probably has a personal favorite character or two they greet on their visits to this wing of the Lower School as well, from Sendak-inspired “wild things” to Mo Willems’s Elephant and Piggie.

 

Far from being merely cute and lovable, the squishy denizens are, in fact, part of a careful strategy that extends all the way across the grassy expanse of Stamper Commons to Raether Library, where Middle and Upper School students find board games, silly guessing and voting contests, whimsical themed displays, and rainbow-hued neon signage coexisting with the robust collection of print and digital resources that underscore CA’s deserved reputation for academic rigor.

 

Director of Libraries and Lower School Librarian Allison Peters Jensen explains that the focus on fun follows from one simple idea. “As a department here at CA, the Libraries recognize that the high-achieving young people we serve, these busy athletes and artists, readers and researchers, are still kids who need delight in their days, and we are privileged to be able to help provide that.”

More than just delight, CA’s two libraries are a virtual “Room of Requirement,” the magical chamber in Hogwarts Castle that can provide anything a young witch or wizard needs. Looking for a quiet place to put the finishing touches on an assignment before school? Want to check out the latest installment in that Japanese manga series? Seeking quick research help from a teacher or Librarian? Excited to browse a new collection of chapter books? Need to catch a cat-nap before afternoon sports? Racing to complete a “Genre Bingo” card? Hoping to find friends to continue a never-ending game of Bananagrams? Or just hankering for a hug from a stuffed golden retriever? CA’s libraries check all these boxes and more.

 

“In the education landscape we live in now, it is a rarity to have a fully staffed library in which collections, curriculum, and events are curated just for our own community,” explains Upper School Librarian Allie Bronston. It is even more rare, she notes, to have the resources, flexibility, and institutional support to adapt, in near real time, to the emerging needs of teachers and students, from special book requests that support a new course offering, to on-demand classroom and common space for collaboration and community.

Says Bronston, “We are crowdsourcing our best practices.” 

 

At the same time, much of what CA’s Librarians think about day to day is informed by years of experience and evolving industry research, which increasingly suggest that, at every age, literacy is in decline, and books are no longer the central players they once were in young people’s coming-of-age. It is almost unnecessary, at this point in human history, to note that instantaneous information retrieval and ubiquitous digital devices have made print—even face-to-face human interaction—seem quaint, maybe even archaic.

But those are among the areas in which libraries excel, and CA’s Library staff are determined to make their valuable, and still very valued, spaces destinations to satisfy essential human needs that no always-on screen or AI chatbot has yet to fully meet: connection, refuge, surprise, companionship, laughter, and, yes, even information.

 

“A school like Colorado Academy will always have its corps of highly engaged readers,” argues Peters Jensen, “but for so many of our students, the magic happens when paging through an illustrated book connects to a project in art class, or researching animal facts informs what’s happening in science.” The Lower School Library, she notes, is much more than a collection of books. Its double doors provide entry into an entire world of discovery and delight that supports all the learning and growth that teachers witness elsewhere on campus. 

“We serve our students for as many as seven years, from Pre-K to Grade 5, and in that time we witness such an incredible amount of developmental change, new passions and interests—we get excited just trying to keep up with these learners we come to know so well.”

 

Bronston refers to “slow food,” the movement which arose in the 1980s and 90s in defense of local, handcrafted cuisine and in protest against the homogenization of mass-produced and fast food. What libraries like CA’s can uniquely provide, with all the understanding they possess of the learners they’re serving at any given moment, she observes, is “analog,” human-centered experiences: getting a book recommendation from a Librarian who knows every reader’s enthusiasms, browsing a lightup display of themed titles, sitting beside a project partner brainstorming ideas on scratch paper, working with friends at completing a puzzle during a break between classes, or serendipitously discovering (as a couple of Peters Jensen’s Fifth Grade researchers did) that the official state beverage of Ohio is tomato juice.

 

“Some of my favorite moments in the Library are literally hearing friends bicker jokingly over one of our weekly guessing games at the circulation desk,” adds Raether Library Assistant Becci Marzonie, “or how to vote in our ‘This or That?’ competitions. It’s a ritual; it’s comforting. Our students are so happy to be here.”

Genre: a double-edged sword

One of the best places to observe the ways in which CA’s Libraries can flex and change to better teach and delight their regular customers is in the approach they take to organizing their collections. Both Lower School and Raether teams recently undertook significant projects to relabel and relocate huge swaths of books; while their reasons for doing so were largely identical, the results were tellingly distinct.

In the Lower School Library just as in Raether, notes Library Assistant Jordan Knowles, regular analysis of checkout data offers a window into students’ shifting preferences, the trends and peer recommendations that help drive their growth as a reader. A few years ago, she and Peters Jensen began to notice among older elementary students a significant rise in the popularity of graphic novels, and a corresponding drop in chapter book checkouts. At the same time, they were absorbing new research showing that Third and Fourth Grade constitute a sort of literacy “tipping point.” 

“Their experiences at this age really determine whether students will become lifelong readers,” explains Knowles.

 

Looking to ensure that CA’s Lower School students would continue to explore a broad range of literature, rather than homing in solely on the most popular books, the two Librarians shuffled the collections of graphic novels and chapter books by genre, so that a reader looking for, say, one of “The Baby-Sitters Club” graphic novels might stumble across a new favorite chapter book in the same “realistic fiction” genre.

“We pulled all of these titles off the shelves and piled them on the floor; then we debated in which genre each one belonged,” Knowles relates—historical fiction, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, horror, or humor, for example. Adding color-coded stickers to each book’s spine, the two reshelved their now intermingled fiction collection and introduced a new yearlong game, Genre Bingo, to encourage readers to explore it.

 

The results were beyond anything they could have hoped for. Students who previously had seemed apprehensive about venturing outside their literary “lane,” Knowles recounts, were now racing their peers to read books from across their entire grade-level spectrum and fill in every genre on their Bingo cards. One legendary Fourth Grade patron filled five of the cards, representing five books completed within every library genre over the course of a school year. Now a Fifth Grader, this star reader is wondering whether to try to beat their own record this year, says Knowles.

Meanwhile, in the Middle and Upper School’s Raether Library, Bronston and her colleague, Middle School Librarian Mary Leyva, had started seeing a similar reluctance by students to stray outside of their reading lane—by Sixth Grade and continuing through Twelfth, the Raether Librarians could see in their own trove of checkout data that students were often limiting their reading to single genres, which were an existing feature of the Middle and Upper School cataloging system. 

Responding to the same research about reading’s decline that had spurred change in the Lower School Library, Bronston, Leyva, and Marzonie decided to “de-genre-fy” their fiction collection, reorganizing shelves by author and title instead. Their reasoning: A reader looking for a new book in their favorite genre now would see not just other books in the same genre, but titles in a completely different category—and possibly discover a passion that they’d never have explored before.

 

Two CA libraries, two outcomes, but one shared goal. As Peters Jensen explains, “Part of our mission at CA is nurturing curiosity and a love of adventurous learning, and we’ve found that, for example, encouraging a reader who didn’t think of themselves as a mystery fan to actually cross the aisle and step out of their literary comfort zone leads to all kinds of growth.”

“The beauty of being at CA,” adds Bronston, “is that we don’t have to try to alter a top-down system driven by administrative priorities; we can just go ahead and change the system so it works for the students and teachers in front of us right now.”

Best of the rest

Books, as central as they might seem to the very definition of a library, occupy only about 20-30% of CA Librarians’ actual time spent on campus. The rest is taken up with designing curriculum and programming, creating displays and fun activities, consulting with teachers and students, and keeping up with industry journals and research. 

 

Lower School Librarians work especially closely with teachers, devising collaborative lessons and projects that extend classroom learning by way of unique Library resources. In one recent cross-curricular initiative, Peters Jensen and Knowles partnered with Lower School Technology Instructor Travis Reynolds to create a new unit delving into the origins of printed books and the history of libraries. During their Library time, Fourth Graders learn about 15th century German inventor Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable-type printing press and create their own “illuminated” manuscripts inspired by those produced on Gutenberg’s machine. Later on, the students visit Reynolds’ Wonder Workshop to construct a press to print their own works.

“There isn’t just one way children connect with books and literature,” notes Peters Jensen. “Our curriculum can tap into so many other skills and other parts of their lives here at CA.”

 

With her Sixth Grade students, Leyva recently hosted a book “tasting” in Raether Library’s North Classroom, featuring a curated selection of titles that students could sample in a “speed-dating”-style session set to a musical cafe soundscape. “Changing the space for reading changed the whole vibe,” she says. 

 

The North Classroom is the largest of the numerous flexible spaces inside Raether Library. “As good as gold” on CA’s space-constrained campus, according to Marzonie, these reservable rooms include student work pods, a teacher space, and the Innovations classroom, where Leyva works with Director of Educational Technology Laura Farmer to coach Middle Schoolers through hands-on projects in robotics, coding, and more. It is also the home base for two initiatives Bronston oversees: the Upper School Library Advisory Board and the Upper School Book Club.

 

The Advisory Board, explains Bronston, comprises a small group of highly engaged Seniors who effectively serve as student advocates for Raether Library. “We look to these enthusiastic Library users to help shape not only our collection, but also the ways that we continue to pull other Upper Schoolers into the Library’s orbit.” The Book Club, as well, aims to bring together CA’s most passionate print enthusiasts to have fun reading together, generating ideas and camaraderie around literature.

 

What is one thing that’s hardly mentioned in CA’s Libraries? Computers. Both Raether and the Lower School Library offer access to a broad range of digital collections, databases, and reference materials, of course. But where 10 to 20 years ago many Librarians felt a sense of urgency about turning their spaces into digital hubs, bristling with work stations, video games, and other tech, today, argues Bronston, the trend, at least at CA, is back toward in-person experiences. 

 

“Most of our students now have nearly unlimited access to their laptops and smartphones—stepping outside of that virtual world is almost a novelty,” she observes. 

In an era that is increasingly short on physical community spaces, adds Marzonie, “Libraries become a valuable commodity—places that can be used for almost anything. Especially here at CA, people are flocking to the Library for so many different reasons: We just need to make it as useful and handy and welcoming as possible for everyone.”