There is no library. There is a room, or half a room, or a corridor with some shelving in it, and somebody has decided there should be a library. That somebody is now probably you.
This is the order that works. It is written for a school with very little money, because that is most schools.
First, be honest about the room
Walk into the space and answer three questions before you think about books at all.
Can children get to it during the school day without asking permission from three adults? A library they cannot reach is a store cupboard with good intentions.
Is there somewhere to sit? Even two beanbags changes what the room is for. A room with only shelves is somewhere you take a book from. A room with a chair is somewhere you read.
Who locks it, and when? Decide early, because it determines whether the library is open at break time, which is when children actually use it.
Getting books, and the donation trap
You will be offered donations. Take them, and then be ruthless, because a shelf of water-damaged 1980s encyclopedias teaches children that the library is where old things go.
Sort every donation into three piles as it arrives. Books children will genuinely pick up. Books that are fine but wrong for this school, which you pass on. And books to recycle, which will be more than you expect and which you should not feel guilty about.
For buying, the rule that serves small schools best: buy fewer copies of more titles, and buy for the readers you have rather than the readers you wish you had. Ten titles children finish beat fifty they abandon. If your struggling readers are eleven and reading at seven, you need books that look like eleven-year-old books and read like seven-year-old books, and those are a specific thing to shop for.
How many books do you actually need
People quote ratios like ten books per child. For a school of 400 that is 4,000 books, which is not happening this year and does not need to.
A working school library starts at about 300 to 500 titles, if they are the right ones. That is enough that a child who comes in twice a week finds something new. Below roughly 200 the shelves look picked-over within a month, which is the thing that kills the habit.
Aim for a shape rather than a number. Roughly half fiction, because that is what gets borrowed. Enough picture books for the youngest year you serve. A working set of non-fiction on the subjects your school actually teaches, plus the perennials: animals, space, sport, how things work, and whatever your students are obsessed with this year.
Shelving that works for children
Face some covers outward. Bookshops do this and libraries mostly do not, and it is the single cheapest change to how much gets borrowed. A spine says nothing to a nine-year-old.
Put the youngest readers’ books at the bottom, where they can reach them, and keep the top shelf for things adults fetch.
Do not fill the shelves. A shelf packed tight is one children will not put books back into, and a shelf with a gap invites browsing.
Decide the rules before you open, not after
Write down four things and stick them on the wall.
How long a loan lasts. Two weeks suits most schools.
How many books at once. Two or three for younger children, more if you trust them.
What happens when a book is late. The honest answer for most schools is nothing, and you should consider that seriously. Fines mostly teach children that libraries are places where you can get in trouble, and plenty of school libraries have dropped them and seen returns hold up fine.
Who can borrow. Staff too, and say so, because a teacher reading in front of a class is worth more than any poster you could put up.
Then catalogue it
Only now. Cataloguing an unsorted pile of donations is wasted work, because a third of it will not survive the sort.
The short version is to scan the barcodes rather than typing titles, decide early on the difference between a book and a copy of a book, and use fewer categories than you think. We wrote the longer version separately: how to catalogue a school library.
If somebody already keeps a list in a spreadsheet, do not retype it. Most systems import it, and there is a way to do that without losing anything.
Opening, and the first term
Do not have a grand opening. Open quietly, in a normal week, and let it fill up.
The habits that matter in the first term are small. Somebody in the room at break time. A shelf of recommendations that changes. A visible way to ask for a book you do not have, even if it is a notebook on the desk, because a child asking for a title is the strongest signal you will ever get about what to buy next.
At the end of the first year, count what you have and what has gone missing. Losing a small percentage a year is a normal cost of lending books to children, and counting it takes an afternoon. Knowing the number is what turns “the library needs money” into a sentence a head teacher can act on.
The part nobody tells you
The library will be judged on whether children use it, and children use it because of who is in the room and what is on the shelves, in that order. The catalogue, the labels and the system are scaffolding. Useful scaffolding, and worth doing properly, but they are not the thing.
Start with one shelf of books somebody wants to read, and a chair.
BeeShelf is a library system for schools, NGOs and small libraries. Start free, or read the other articles.