A brief look at ‘grams of interest to engage teens and librarians navigating this social media platform.
It’s that time of year when public, school, and academic libraries start to feel the madness — the book madness, that is! To coincide with the March Madness basketball tournament, many libraries are hosting their own tournament with brackets of books. Frequently called Literary March Madness or Book Madness, librarians pit books against one another and ask library users to vote for their favorite titles. The sky is the limit when it comes to organizing brackets as the examples below spotlight different genres or categories (teen books vs. banned books, humor vs. local writers), sports books in general, staff picks, or pit popular characters against each other. When it comes to the voting process, there is also a bit of variation with some libraries opting for traditional handwritten bracket sheets and others heading online via social media, Google forms, or Survey Monkey.
Is you library participating in the big book dance and hosting a literary tournament? We want to hear from you! How do you go about choosing which books to include? Do you set up the pairings yourself or are you a fan of an online bracket generator? Which method of submitting votes have you found works best for your teens? Do you change your categories from year to year to keep it interesting?
Have you come across a related Instagram post this week, or has your library posted something similar? Have a topic you’d like to see in the next installment of Instagram of the Week? Share it in the comments section of this post.
Thx for including our photo! We use our LMS to determine the most often checked out books of the last 12 months (and we add in a few recent faves). We invite students through the school’s morning ammouncements to come in and vote. We prefer to walk table to table at lunch to ask students to vote. It’s a way to build relationships with kids and talk about books with them. We’re down to our final four this week!
That sounds like a great way to engage students and get the word out!