How to Label Bluebonnet Books

From Sara Pope, 11:36AM:

I wanted to share some information on how to properly label the Bluebonnet and Lone Star books with date labels. Please share this information with the person/people that label your Bluebonnet and Lone Star books!

For label placement, according to Chris Patrick, “The date label is placed on the upper spine ¼ inch from the top of the book.”  

Bluebonnet date labels should be on the blue labels, and Lone Star date labels should be on the bright yellow labels. If you need more of these labels, please contact Chris Patrick, and he’ll quickly send you more.

For what date to put on the Bluebonnets, this is what Sally Bates told me: “For Bluebonnets, they should have the year that they are being read.  They have a 13-month life but the 13^th month is tacked on.” So the “new” Bluebonnets should have 2015 on them, since they will be read in 2015, and voted on in January of 2016 (the 13^th month that is tacked on). The Bluebonnets that are currently being voted on should have a 2014 date label. Don’t forget, all those 2014 Bluebonnet books are on the Name That Book list for HISD, so there is still demand for them until the Name That Book contest happens (finals are March 6, 2015). This means you can put them back into your collection after voting for the Bluebonnets are over (end of January), but you won’t want to weed extra copies until after March 6.

I’m attaching the date label template for your convenience, with the 2015 labels ready to print out!

I hope this information will help us present a uniform look to our Bluebonnet and Lone Star books, especially since we have floating collections, we want all of our Bluebonnet and Lone Star books to be labeled in a consistent way. If you have any questions about the information in this email, please don’t hesitate to ask!

From Sally Bates, 11:48AM:

Thanks Sara, for sharing this.  I would chime in to say, we thank you for labeling these items and keeping the labeling consistent across the system!  I helps so much with the way our collections look as well as to knowing why we have multiples of a given title.

I will mention that the Bluebonnet and Lone Star books stay on the HISD Name that Book list for an entire year after the award year. 

Unless they are in poor condition, past Bluebonnets and Lone Stars are not automatically approved for discard – nor are we weeding items in good condition due to the current weeding moratorium.  Floating creates a whole new wrinkle with Bluebonnets and Lone Stars now!  Before we could ask you to weed down to the number you need at your location, but now your location may have accumulated a third of the system’s copies!  If you weeded down to just your location’s needs, the rest of the system would lose out.

I am hoping that we can send guidelines as to who should weed how many of the 2014 Lone Stars and Bluebonnets as soon as we can weed them, which I think will be helpful to maintaining the overall number we need in the system to meet ongoing demand.    We have begun adding paperback copies which is helping and have some other plans for the future as well.