Opening the Book Blog - Bringing Your Books Alive

Opening the Book focus their work on reading for pleasure, underpinned by an in-depth understanding of how customers use library spaces and interact with staff.

Director Rachel Van Riel explains ‘Our library design work comes directly out of our staff training experience. Around 20,000 staff have taken our training courses across five continents and we now have a huge amount of data about customer behaviours in libraries. Every learner carries out customer interviews, observations and experiments with space and display. The results are remarkably consistent – we know what works to make a library look good and perform well.’

Opening the Book designs discovery layouts which pull customers forward from the entrance to explore the space and the resources. Views open up as you move through the library and books are brought into the eyeline at every turn. Shelving and desking flow in organic curves instead of stiff, straight rows.

Every library can benefit from applying good merchandising principles to their space and shelving.Libraries are lenders not retailers, but they can learn from booksellers’ marketing techniques. How and where books are displayed can really make a difference, encouraging library customers to explore new titles and topics and expand their reading horizons.

Two contemporary libraries in Milton, Ontario, illustrate the success of applying Opening the Book principles. They are both libraries of similar size in good locations.

Beaty has a much larger book collection than Sherwood – 41,000 items in contrast to 21,000 items. Sherwood was designed and installed by Opening the Book; the library team worked with them to plan optimal stock levels to enable a more open discovery layout and much better merchandising with face-out display.

Beaty has tall traditional shelving – both the space and the shelves are densely packed.

At Sherwood the books have space to breathe – a gentle curve creates a warm embrace with space to linger and browse without fear of being bumped into by another customer trying to get past. The flexible shelving can be flipped from deep to shallow setting so both small and large books sit at the front of the shelf and not in shadow at the back. The signage is consciously retail in style – clear and simple in wording and style.

The result? Beaty has twice as many books on the shelves but Sherwood consistently outperforms Beaty on issues by a factor of 3:1. The illustration below shows particular success in merchandising adult non-fiction, an area which has declined in issues in many libraries across both the UK and North America. At Sherwood, 44% of the total adult non-fiction is out on loan at any one time. Could this be a record?

Opening the Book say library shelving is not about capacity and storage in the 21^st century – it is about performance. It’s not about how many books - it’s about which books are placed where and how they are displayed. This can be what makes or breaks the success of a library.

Opening the Book’s online courses teach library staff how to manage first impressions, and plan the best locations, adjacencies and book selections for maximum collection performance.

Their most popular course is Merchandising the Bookshelves The five-hour online course costs £50 and is aimed at librarians and library assistants, who will need a recommended extra five hours to apply their learning in the library. The course is packed with ideas and tips, including fun interactive exercises where learners select book covers and move them around on virtual shelves. Learners can go at their own pace and start and stop as they like.

Each section of the course explores a different aspect of merchandising in libraries:

1. How readers choose
2. Getting the shelf display right
3. Choosing books to display
4. Children and young people
5. Maintaining merchandising

In a nutshell, Opening the Book say this course ‘teaches how to give those unloved shelves a makeover’ - including non-fiction - by adapting retail techniques to boost library performance.

It’s an opportunity to learn how to reinvigorate less-used shelves and to promote reader development. What’s not to like?