As a new semester is brought in, so is a shipment of 1600 new books to our library. All of these books were added on Monday, January 9^th. This is the biggest shipment of books the school has received since Vandegrift first opened. In fact, there are so many books that it took over a week for the librarians to put them all on the shelves.

“I don’t like paying for books at the store, so I’m glad the library got some new additions,” senior Gabby Arevalo said.

A lot of the new books were on the Best Books of 2011 lists. All of the books are in the library catalogue so students can see all of the new additions, like The Help, IQ84 and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

“There are a lot of end of the world type books, like The 11^th Plague and The Future of Us,” librarian Ms. Lopez said.

Many of the other new books were added to fill in some of the series the library already has, like Matched, Blue Bloods, Dune and Game of Thrones.

“We still needed to build collections [series]. There are some really big collections,” Ms. Lopez said.

Choosing these books is a long process. The library finds these titles by looking in magazines, reading book reviews and professional reviews, and they also add student recommended books. Another source for finding good book titles is goodreads.com, where you put in what books you have enjoyed in the past and they recommend new books for you to read.

The criteria for a book being able to join the library is having a positive review in a professional magazine or school journal and the book also needs to be popular. Other criteria considered are the quality of the book and the author’s intended audience.

“With more books, there are more reasons to check out books,” senior Matt Earp said.