When the art library was moved from its location many years ago and the library system moved to Horizon, hundreds of the books were not catalogued and added to the system. They were invisible in the searches and forgotten. In an effort to make them visible again, the head librarian and I took upon our own hands the task of cataloguing these books using records online and adding them to Horizon. We have converted more than 1,500 books so far.
Along the way we have found some very interesting or fun books and thought it would be great to make an exhibition with them. This process is called retroconversion (retro for short) and so we named it Retro Descubre (Retro Discover) since the process felt like an exploration discovery adventure as we found books we had no idea were in the collection. We selected some of the coolest books we discovered for the exhibition and I designed promo for it as well as reels for Instagram. Every book that had to be retroconverted had a bookmark to identify it. So we had rows and rows of shelves with them. I decided to make a fun reel for Instagram including them and to promote the new exhibition. Below you can see photos of the exhibition and the reels mentioned.
Me, a student and another library assistant drawing what would be the wall art for the exhibition.
The art finished. It was made with chalk on a chalkboard painted wall.
Books from the exhibition. Calligraphy, nature art, engravings.
Books from the exhibition. Ancient jewelry, textiles, costumes.
Books from the exhibition. Animal anatomy, herbal art, patterns.
Two of the display tables.
I made an infographic to explain what retro conversion. This way the general public could understand the process and appreciate the exhibition better.
The library always had this display cube in storage because they did not know what to do with it. I thought it would be perfect to use it in the exhibition and used it to display the infographic, a book and other information.
I wanted to have something interactive in the exhibition for the students. For this purpose I placed this table with envelopes and paper so the students could write a letter to their future selves and open it at the end of the semester when they needed some motivation. It would be a letter from the past that helped them in the present. Similar to how we discovered these books during retro and they motivated this exhibition.
Below are the reels I made for the exhibition:
Exhibition Promo Reel
Retro Letter Promo
These are the carousel pictures for the Instagram exhibition post. In them we explained what the exhibition was.
This was also printed and placed inside the display cube.
This project has been incredibly important. So many books had topics and information that is helpful for our patrons and had been invisible in the system for so long. Now little by little we discover more of them. Sharing our discoveries with the public through the exhibition is a perfect way of helping them understand one of the many things that happen in a library.