This is a pivotal part of us providing a library to a deserving school. We depend on our annual book drive to bring in the much-needed resources to fill each library. It is a great opportunity for us to let people know what our mission is and why we build libraries overseas, through this annual collection process. We have donations from teachers updating their classroom libraries, and also school libraries that are receiving new books, they will remove duplicate copies to make room on their existing shelves.
Another great benefit is to see our team of volunteers working together, which unifies our team well before we arrive to setup each library.
Now that we have collected books and resources for our new library project. We are tasked with organizing resources by editing, sorting, classifying and labeling everything before we pack into boxes. Our goal is to know content and amount as we load boxes onto pallets for our shipment. Please note every school that we donate a library to, has never had a functioning library or resource of reading books. So, we must make sure its organized and labelled before we ship overseas. It would take too much time to involve them in this process as they have no frame of reference so we install everything and then train onsite.
I have detailed the general process below so that you can see the time and effort it takes for us to provide these resources into each library. Also, you might want to help in the future with shipment or assist with collection or donation for future book drives.
Oftentime we send out a criteria for the resources we are collecting in our book drive flyer and we will have to first identify if our collection received is something we can use for this project.
Step 1: Books that don’t make the shipment:
- Old or worn books with outdated information
- Book titles -Scary or Inappropriate context
- USA textbook -Doesn’t support school’s curriculum
- Encyclopedias
Once this step is complete of removing unwanted items, we can actually start our sorting process.
Step 2: Sorting Books
This is vital to understand which books for each age group and the type of school the library will be installed. We must sort accordingly before packing into boxes.
Separate by age groups:
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- Adults (age 17 and up),
- High school (aged 13-17),
- Middle school (ages 9-13)
- Elementary (ages 6-9),
- Pre-School (ages 2-6)
It is good to have large bins/boxes with signs for each age group as you sort.
Look through each book carefully to determine which age category is appropriate.
You will need additional bins to divide your age groups again by fiction and non-fiction.
Separate your age groups into fiction or non-fiction:
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- Fiction books are story formats
- Non-fiction includes factual, technical, and informational texts
Step 3: Classifying and Labeling
We will pick one color label per topic and establish a chart to help identify and label all books before packing into boxes. We provide this listing to help the school identify and label new books in the future, and to establish log of all book contained in their library.
How to classify by topic:
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- Bible Stories, Religion
- Animals That Act like People, Fantasy and Folklore
- Nonfiction
- General Science
- Nature
- Technology
- Books About People
- Books About Pets
- Easy Biographies
- Numbers and Counting Books
- ABC Books
- Poems, Rhymes, and Songs
- “I Can Read” Books (Easy Readers)
For fictional books you may have fairy tale, mystery, comedy, folk tales, poetry, and science fiction.
Non-fictional books are categorized such as (but not limited to) biographies, technology, career, religion, animals, and reference materials.
Reference materials such as atlases, maps, magazines and dictionaries.
This chart will help each school to identify location of books when shelving and to establish log for book inventory. We also pack posters and other decorative items to place within the space to warm it up for the different age groups like area rugs and stuffed animals for the small ones.