I have virtual bookshelf envy. There are some really amazing ones out there, and once again, I am in awe of the librarians out there, especially, in this case, the school librarians, who are figuring out ways to keep their kids reading, engaged, and interested. So I started playing around with creating my own virtual bookshelf, and made one with Google Slides.
While I was able to link each individual book in the Google Slide to my library’s book detail page, it doesn’t work if I download it as a PDF or a JPG, so that’s something you may want to keep in mind (at least, I haven’t figured out how to do it, yet, if it’s a possibility). So I’ll link the Google Slide here, if you want to see the links, and post the .JPG below.
This is a quick Back to School bookshelf I put together for littles, but I think it looks pretty snazzy, no? I found a quick video that is super helpful, if you’re interested. You can open a Google Slide blank, change the background and do an image search to find a bookshelf. From there, you can Insert book cover JPGs and PNGs, size them as you want, and put them on the shelves. You can click on the book cover, click the “insert link” icon, and add links to your library system, a GoodReads link, or your own book reviews, and share as you’d like. If you do want it to show up as a graphic file, and save it as a PNG or JPG, though, I haven’t figured out how to keep those links available when you download (unless you want to link the bookshelf files to the Google Slide, which has the links).
How will I use this? I can email the Google Slide to schools that I normally work with, and offer them a bunch of bookshelves with subjects of interest to the teachers and students (Minecraft bookshelves for the WIN!). The kids can click through to the library system’s page, and either borrow an ebook, if we have it available, or request a hard copy to be sent to their nearest open library to be picked up. I’ll report back on how this works, and if you have done something similar, I’d love to hear from you on how it’s working.
Next up: a Bitmoji library!
Mom Read It 