Library Card Month Display, September 2010

Speaking of buildings, back in September we created a bulletin board display near the reference desk of the Headquarters branch library. This display was used to promote Library Card Month. 


On our district’s patron library card, we have a picture of the Headquarters library, but we have also have ten other branch buildings (which will become eleven in the near future). At one time, not too long ago, each branch library had a watercolour painting made of it. For the display I used printouts of these watercolours placed in polaroid-style frames to show all the different locations the library district has branches, and then used a giant scaled-up version of a library card with the Headquarters library on it (as see top image above).


I covered the bulletin board with two long sheets of light gray butcher paper, then pinned each branch polaroid watercolour in a row across the top. Large headline printouts were also pinned into place, and in the center two giant cards—each 32x20in.—were placed, one with the back view showing and one with the front view. 


Normally, with images needing to be printed larger than our office copier, I would print them out on our Hewlett Packard DesignJet 800, but it was in need of some repairs at that time, so I had to print out scans of the two giant cards onto four 11x17in. tabloid-sized pages for each card by tiling the images, then trimming each page and splicing the pages together. Once trimmed to size, I double-side taped them to quarter inch foam core board. You can see in the lower right image how big the card was compared to my hand as I worked on it.


I liked that the cards were thick, as if they were really enlarged cards. That added a little dimension to them, but I really wanted them to pop off the wall even more, so I hunted around for something I could use to raise one card off the wall even further. We didn’t have any styrofoam and I didn’t want to stack multiple layers of cardboard together for fear it would make the card too heavy to hang, so finally I decided on double-side taping four empty scotch tape boxes to the back of the card I wanted to have lay overtop the other. This was really dimensionality on the cheap! The raised the upper card just enough to clear the lower card and gave it a little “levitation” off the display wall. I was really concerned that the tape would eventually fail and that I would walk by a couple hours or event a day later and find it on the floor. Amazingly, it never did and stayed where I placed it for the full month!