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Updates to The Story Center Collection

Updates to The Story Center Collection

January 28, 2025

The Story Center Collection is getting an update! Here at The Story Center, one exciting resolution for 2025 is to complete the collection updates that began in 2024. The current collection, housed inside the Woodneath branch, is comprised of four sections: the Primary Collection, Periodicals, ReadLOCAL, and the Thusnelda Schmidt Storytelling Collection. Those sections will remain, and within them, we plan on more strategically and purposefully aligning the collection with our mission at The Story Center, “To help people create stories, share those stories, and connect with the stories of others.”

As you can see in the featured image, we hope to communicate these updates through displays. Our main displays are the forward-facing books at the beginning of the Primary Collection, highlighting the topics we plan on focusing on. Divided into five headings, they are:

  1. Perform: Materials relevant to the practice of oral storytelling, including folklore and fairy tales, instructional tips/tricks, recommendations from program presenters, and ideally recorded performances.
  2. Create: Items pertaining to creating digital and/or less traditional means of storytelling, such as podcasts, video games, movies, music, and graphic novels.
  3. Write: Materials focusing on creating stories using the written word, including many how-to guides, reflections on the writing process, and creative writing prompts.
  4. Publish and Promote: This section covers how to spread the word about your stories and all things publishing, from self-publishing to traditional publishing, and the options in between.
  5. Read and Connect: For those who consider themselves storytellers and/or those not necessarily looking to share a story of their own, these items will be memoirs/biographies, oral histories, anthologies, essays, and collections of stories from various and diverse viewpoints to illustrate the importance of how stories can connect us all.

Another way we are updating and aligning our collection is by curating our current selection and purchasing new titles that fit our mission, incorporating the headings listed above. We also review all items throughout the collection to determine if new spine labels are needed. Our goal is to make the entire collection easy to browse for inspiration or navigate when searching for specific titles. New and clearly labeled materials will certainly make a big impact.

While completing these updates won’t happen overnight, we hope you’ll take the time to check out our work in progress, attend Story Center programming, or pop into the historic Woodneath home for a visit! If you have any title or material suggestions for The Story Center collection, please email me at LGezich@mymcpl.org. For more information on The Story Center and our collection, please visit https://www.mymcpl.org/story-center. To browse our collection online, click here: https://www.mymcpl.org/story-center/resources/collection.

We look forward to helping you create, share, and connect with stories!

Leanna Gezich
Story Center Associate

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