FARMINGTON – Regional School Unit 9 students have some extra options at their school libraries this spring, thanks to a collaboration between Devany Doak & Garrett Booksellers and the Farmington Rotary.
DDG Booksellers has always been looking for a way to reuse Advanced Reading Copies, or ARCs. The books, provided to stores for reviewing purposes prior to deciding whether or not to stock them, cannot be resold. According to Kenny Brechner, DDG Booksellers’ owner, that leaves the store with roughly 800 ARCs acquired each year, with no easy way to reuse more than a few of the otherwise-functional books.
So when the Farmington Rotary approached the store about collaborating on a children’s literacy project a couple of years ago, store employee Karin Schott remembered the ARCs. She suggested the construction of little libraries within the schools, allowing students to freely take the books. In addition to helping students, Schott said, the program would recycle the store’s ARCs.
Miniature libraries were built to go into the schools. Dennis O’Neil, a Farmington Rotary member, worked with other Rotarians and the high school Interact Club to create, piece together and paint the house-shaped shelves. Teacher Jake Bogar and his Foster Career and Technical Center pre-engineering students burned logos into the shelves, while Metal Fabrication students built the bases.
Brechner created a portal in his website to allow students to leave reviews for the ARCs they pick up. That idea grew out of an earlier use for the books, in which Brechner would give books to students and publish their reviews. Students can either return the ARCs to the shelf or keep them, if they find something they really like.
“I love the layers of community partnership involved,” Brechner said. One of the missions of the store was to share a love of reading with the community, he noted. “We’ve always thought about what we can do in the schools for the arts.”
The Little Free Libraries are located inside their larger counterparts in each RSU 9 school. The books are age-appropriate young adult and middle grade, with picture-book style Book Like Advertising Demos (BLADs!) in the younger grades.
Brechner and Schott said they were still looking for ways to use their adult ARCs.
