K-Pop Collection
K-Pop arrived to the médiathèque !
Towards the end of 2025 a group of teenage girls started asking me do we have K-Pop music. We only had two albums of BTS, so I bought Blackpink album Born Pink. They continued to ask for more K-Pop music, but since I don't know anything about this genre, I asked them to give me some names of popular and active groups. They gave me the list and I bought albums with the mission to create a K-Pop collection.
When the albums arrived, I catalogued them - the call number is K-POP and then first three letters of the artist name. For example, the CD of the group Seventeen would be K-POP SEV. After the CDs were catalogued, I invited the group of girls who suggested the albums to help showcase the new collection by decorating the space with the posters and artwork included in the cases. Interesting thing about K-Pop is that most albums come with posters, collectible cards and various other goodies, and the girls told me no remove them because people will steal them when they borrow the album. So I removed the goodies and we used the posters to put on the wall. I think that the
What I'm happy about is that this moment went beyond just simply shelving the documents. We created a place of belonging. What I understand so far is that K-Pop isn't just music - its visual, emotional and collective culture. By displaying posters, we transformed the passive collection into a small indentifiable cultural territory.
I hope this approach had positive effects for our library setting:
1. Validation of their passion - I hope that seeing this music in our médiathèque sends them a message : What they love belongs here. I hope this will streighten their sense of recognition and their connection to the médiathèque.
2. Creation of attractive visibility - I hope this space will make K-Pop collection immediately visible and that it will attract other young adults who share this interest, including those who were hesitatnt to to express themselves before.
3. Co-creation process - I hope that the process of selecting and promoting the K-Pop collection gives the feeling to young adults that this space partly belongs to them. Also, I hope that this process will inspire engagement and loyalty, and make user participation in collection building an important part of the médiathèque.
Anyway, this process and brought to me a lot of professional experience and pleasure. I feel extremely happy that I managed to satisfy the users wishes. In my annual objective there is a part about making the Espace musique et cinèma a living space, not just a place where people come to borrow CDs, DVDs, vinyls, instruments or books. And this is exactly connected to this - young adults came to talk to me their ideas, they came and talked about their K-Pop collectible card collections.
It also brings me more ideas concerned this collection - to start a K-Pop monthly club where we could discuss new releases, talk about our favorite bands, learn dance moves, and do other activities ocnnected to K-Pop. In that way, people would stay and live music, in the médiathèque. I talked a little bit to my boss, and he thinks it's a good idea, now I need to write a project. In any case, welcome K-Pop! :)