Improving Your Media Center With the Help of School Library Furniture

School library media centers are among the most important places of learning in the school, and are among the most challenging to design and setup. It helps to periodically improve the appearance of your media center and you can do so with the help of school library furniture. How can this possible? It sure is - if you take time to learn how to effectively choose and setup the kind of school library furniture you will use inside your media center.

You can start by giving students and visitors a warm welcome to your school library media center. Try to make the doors and other entry/exit areas more exciting, bright, and colorful. You can add attractive benches and stools to serve as waiting areas. You can also make use of rugs that complement the color scheme of the whole room. After you have made improvements in the entry/exit areas, it is time you shift your attention to the other parts of the media center.

The circulation desk is often that part of the library or media center where clutter is almost a common feature. However, this should not be an excuse for keeping a pile of junk behind the circulation desk. You can use plastic bins and organizers to steer clear of clutter. It can be annoying and confusing to have so many items on the desk that it is best to keep it clean to make it more appealing to students and visitors. With reduced clutter, it will be a lot easier to find and keep track of what you need.

Then there are the display areas. Always reserve separate areas for new and featured books, magazines, journals, and other reference materials or media, like CDs and DVDs. If this is not possible, you can always make use of a free standing bookcase or display. If your funds will not permit the purchase of new school library furniture, you can always ask permission to paint a certain part of the room with a different color or use a curtain as a backdrop. You can also make use of recycled frames or you can purchase cheap acrylic frames from dollar stores.

Indeed, using fun school library furniture can significantly improve the look of what appears to be your boring media center. Adding bright rugs, a single rocking chair, a brightly colored bean bag, browser bins, and other fun furniture can help much in making a school library media center more appealing to students and visitors.

The Future of Digital Media - No More Physical Copies

The advent of the compact disc (CD), and later the digital versatile disc (DVD) were, at the times of their respective creation, were thought to be the end all and be all of media storage and playback. There have been other types of digital media designed for the mass market such as digital audio tapes (DAT's), mini disc's (MD's) to name but a couple of mediums that were at the time, touted as the next big thing to revolutionize how we stored, listened to and watched our digital media. And now, with the mainstream fully embracing Blu-Ray technology, digital optical media seems to have peaked in terms of capability and usefulness.

If you were to discover that optical media, regardless of whether we're talking about cd's, dvd's or the impossibly awesome blu-ray, had a limited lifespan and in fact may not be the ultimate storage or playback method...well, you'd likely be a bit surprised, shocked, maybe even a bit angry depending on how much money and time you've invested in your media library. Guess what?

Digital media and optical storage methods are, in fact, not built to last forever, despite what you may think based on what you've read or have been told by the salesman who sold you your blu-ray player. Great. All those cases of cd's and dvd's and blu-rays have a finite lifespan attached to them - now what? Wait until the next disc based storage format comes along? Sell off your collections based in anticipation of the next even smaller storage format? Believe it or not, the future is already here and slowly gaining traction in the form of all digital content that you stream from a central location throughout your home.

With the rising popularity of services like Netflix and iTunes, consumers are quickly becoming used to the notion of not actually owning physical copies of their media. It may take some time to wrap your head around the idea of going all digital, after all, having bookcases or closets or racks and racks full of music and movies is impressive to look at and, until recently, the commonplace and accepted method of storage and display.

Being able to back-up and copy all of your optical media to one central location, such as a plug in hard drive attached to your main computer, would instantly eliminate the need for physical copies. The space savings alone are enough of an incentive for many consumers to consider this option. Add in the ability to stream wirelessly to any location in your home or to your portable devices, and the idea of owning physical copies of your music and movies seems downright old fashioned.

If you don't have wireless in your home, there is always an alternative option. By utilizing a media hub or similar device, you can simply unplug your hard drive and connect it to whatever TV screen you choose to use. This method also makes your entire library portable - you could easily take your entire library of music and movies with you wherever you go. Try taking one thousand DVD's anywhere and you'll see the benefit of an all-digital library pretty quickly!

Many of the music or film purists who have large collections will always cite the inability to have cover art as one of the reasons to retain physical copies of films and music. There is some merit to this as cover art is an established and attractive part of the music or film contained within. But many of the media players and all digital storage methods offer the user the ability to attach album covers and movie poster art to their corresponding digital files (*"cover flow" in iTunes is a great example of this), thus allowing you to retain the familiar while utilizing the new methodology.