DIY Shelf Signage: recycled magazine holders and repurposed shelf dividers

My media center has been in dire need of better shelf signage ever since I got the job. I don't know why it took me so long to get around to fixing such a simple yet vital thing. I guess I had been hesitant to spend a lot of money, and didn't really know what to do otherwise. While investigating my options, I came across a site showing shelf signs that sat on the shelves next to the books, rather than on the edge of the shelf. I realized then that I finally had a use for all of those old magazine holders that used to house the periodical collection. 

 

For my fiction section,
I measured the front of the holders, and created a page in Microsoft Publisher that was the right dimension. I used our school mascot and colors, and created the fiction genres world cloud at the top using Tagxedo, which gives a lot more customization options than Wordle.


I had one of my student assistants go around and place pieces of scrap paper in between the letters so I could see how far apart they were and judge which letters were best to combine. I'm pretty pleased with the end result here, and I feel like it makes the section much more user-friendly.

The nonfiction section is still not quite done. I've been working on it in phases. First, I used taller magazine holders to create divisions for the hundreds in much the same way I created the signs for fiction. I also wanted to create subdivisions of the tens so that I could put more specific headings on them, but I struggled for a while to find something smaller than the hundreds dividers until I stumbled across these old shelf markers in the back room. Instead of using the yellowed plastic signs that came with them, I headed to Publisher again to whip up some signs. I hit a bit of a snag when I realized that I couldn't but the dividers on the bottom shelves because of the clip on the bottom. I went ahead and made the dividers that would fit on the shelf, and the others are now sitting in my car waiting to have the clip cut off so that they will fit on my bottom shelves.

All told, the signage project took around a week to complete, the bottom shelf dividers notwithstanding. I'm proud of the end result. It's not a professional job, but it looks nice, and really enhances the user-friendliness of the media center. Plus, it makes it a lot easier when shelving because you can walk right to the proper section.