Many changes have come to the Antigo Public Library this year. Our children’s department is blooming & growing. Thanks to the generous endowment donation from the Fogeltanz, longtime residents of Antigo and former employees of the Antigo Daily Journal. The Antigo Public Library Foundation has managed and grown the Fogeltanz donation over the years allowing a new generation to benefit from their generosity to our community.
We continue to grow our collection of games and puzzles. These can be utilized in the library, or taken home and enjoyed.
New browsing shelves for children house the holiday collection making it easier for children to find and enjoy their favorite holiday stories. They’ll also find many different holidays and traditions to explore during the season as well. This collection will continue to grow and expand in breadth over the next year.
The play space continues to grow for early childhood imagination based play and exploration. Please stop in and watch the space develop over the next few weeks as new layers are added to engage children. The library recently acquired a dishwasher, giving staff the ability to sanitize the play food, dishes, and cutlery. Beginning in the new year, each week different items will rotate through the station with a selection of related books. One week may be a pizzeria, the next a bake shop. The possibilities are endless. Explore with us. As this space grows, so will the potting shed, transitioning into a reading space for kids to cozy into with books and friends.
Across from the play space is a selection of books housed within a “parenting” location code. The library does not having an actual parenting section, nor are there restrictions on who can check out these books. All books are shelved to accommodate browsing by individuals of any age or height. The purpose of this collection is to make books easier to find while grouping non-fiction and fiction of the same topic together. If a child is neurodivergent, they can find a non-fiction book discussing neurodivergency on the top shelf, which is 40 inches from the floor – an accessible height for your average six-year-old. While grabbing a non-fiction book discussing the facts of neurodivergencies like autism or ADHD, they can also grab a picture book on the shelf below, allowing them to read stories about other kids like themselves with similar or different experiences. On the bottom shelf, just above the floor, they can grab a board book to read to their younger sibling. There are some empty shelves at the end of the section. In the New Year these shelves will hold true parenting resources, easy to find within the children’s section and allowing parents to find the resources they need while their child finds their own, together. Learning to utilize the library resources – browsing books, finding books, selecting books, handling books, reading books, is library literacy – an important skill for children to learn from their parents as well as their school librarian clerks and Antigo Public Library staff. This location was chosen because it bridges the children’s non-fiction and the children’s fiction sections.
Expect to find some shelves displaying books related to the play tables soon. Vehicles, and trains – Antigo history is deeply tied to trains after all. Building and designing. Arts and crafts. We have begun to add some of the new felt sound dampening accents to the space. They add color, interactive games like tic-tac-toe, and some noise dampening so that children can enjoy the space while others utilize the library for purposes such as work or reading Newspapers.
Our picture book collection continues to grow. Sections are developing to allow for easier browsing by subject matter – an organization style used by the majority of libraries in Wisconsin, including the Marathon County libraries, the Madison libraries, and the Milwaukee libraries. We understand that some families enjoy browsing. We will maintain both, sections that are brows-able by subject and sections that are brows-able by author.
Plans are in the works for a new art station and some additions to the puppet theater space – we cannot wait to share these with you in time. We are also continuing to work on offering new programing for children of all ages in the New Year. In addition to Play Cafe, Story Time, and Wisconsin Children’s January will bring the addition of an Open Art Lab with activities for children of all ages, and a STEAM Play Open Lab for children ages 7-17 yrs. You’ll find more details coming soon as our Program page of the website develops. We hope to see you this holiday season. Come in, decorate some ornaments. Hang them on the library tree or take them home to enjoy.
Your continued patience as we grow and bloom this coming year are so appreciated.
*Update 1/25 – As some continue to misrepresent the “parenting collections” we partnered with WVLS staff at the end of December to make changes and have defined categories for the majority of our picture books. When we began in the fall, our juvenile non-fiction section contained picture books and easy-reader books, which is not age appropriate. It was easier in the short term to pull books out and put them into sections where they could be found with ease while we sorted out the juvenile non-fiction. The “parenting” location code was used as a holding place. Now that our juvenile non-fiction is strictly juvenile non-fiction books and those picture books and easy readers have been pulled out and returned to the picture book and easy reader section, we can shift to using picture book categories. Which will be alphabetized by category name:
ABC’s & Counting; Activism; Biography; Body & Identity; Cats & Dogs; Community; Death & Grief; Dinosaurs; Fairy tales; Family; Farm; Feelings & Manners; Food; History; Holidays; Insects; Migration & Immigration; Music; Outside, Hikes, & Gardens; Penguins (we have a LOT of books with penguins); Seasons & Weather; School; Sleep; and Vehicles. Everything outside of these categories will be alphabetized by author.
It will take us a few weeks to get all the categories done and then set up the section where the books are organized by alphabet based on the author’s last name, not the book character. Once done, everything will be clearly labeled making books so easy to find and browse. This project also highlights the value that consortium membership brings. WVLS will be able to make batch changes allowing us to get the cataloging changes done more quickly than if we worked on them all ourselves. Which means that Elizabeth has more time to catalog new books and we have so many wonderful new kids books to add to our collection in 2025.
