CRIV CONNECTION

Author: The team at Brooklyn Law School Library

Each month, BLS librarians meet with Associate Dean Dominique Fowler and Brooklyn Law School (BLS) Communications staff to learn about upcoming cultural heritage observances and other key BLS events. We now have a year’s worth of related BLS Library Digital Book Displays that you can review. These displays highlight BLS’s Library sources, free sources, and local events. Many of the featured sources are new law-related books. Because BLS is a stand-alone institution, we also purchase/feature selected sources in categories: history, biography/memoir, fiction, and poetry. These displays reflect recommendations from faculty, including Professors Chris Beauchamp, Precious Benally, Elizabeth Chen, Susan Herman, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, Joy Kanwar, Kate Mogulescu, Brittany Persson, Karen Porter, and Jocelyn Simonson. These displays also incorporate recommendations from students, including members of the BLS Lenapehoking Working Group and members of the BLS Indigenous Rights Advocacy Group. Latin American Law Students Association leaders placed Mil Mundos bookstore on our radar. SALSA leader Anchal Kanojia provided many suggestions for our October display.

We use Springshare’s platform LibGuides to host our displays.

• The LibGuides Home page links to an Assets page. Choose the pull-down menu option: Add Content Item > Book from the Catalog to enter information about a source. We created entries for e-books, databases, articles, and factsheets through this Book from the Catalog option. 
• To create a scrolling book display in a LibGuide, it is easy to Add box and select Type: Gallery. Springshare offers 13 Gallery settings. These include options to turn on the Automatically play feature to control the transition speed, and to select the number of slides to show per row.
  • A viewer can turn off the scrolling feature through a circular icon at the bottom of the Gallery box.
• Add “Assets” to a Gallery box through the Add/Edit Panes icon.
• To highlight an upcoming event: Use the Add > Link feature in a guide box.
• We think the digital book displays are clearly visible through laptops, iPhones, and Samsung phones. 

We also review GOBI’s weekly new title alerts to develop our displays. Each Saturday, BLS librarians receive an email highlighting 80-180 GOBI List Purchase Recommendations. (Initially, a library creates a GOBI profile – GOBI’s weekly recommendations are based on the library’s profile.) Our team also searches for upcoming book talks and other events, reads book reviews, and consults with our colleagues in public libraries.

To accommodate book events with heavy interest, we published our displays for Memorial Day, Juneteenth, and Independence Day & Beyond early. We will publish more displays in June and July 2026. We hope these displays will help you to develop your summer reading collections.

Finally, our displays are “works in progress.” For example, we recently added Last Night in Brooklyn: A Novel (2026) to the digital display for Latine Heritage Month (which we will feature in September). See guide tab: Prior Displays.