Genre-Based Shelving

Here is the email I sent to our staff regarding genre-based shelving. I truly think this is going to be so much easier for staff and students, even though it will take some time to get used to and to work out any errors I made in cataloging. Thankfully it's a very flexible way of shelving!

At the bottom you'll see links to more specifics about our shelving.

                                                                                                                                                      

For the new library at Prairie Hill we have decided to shelve books according to genre in all sections. This is a trend that many school libraries are going to, including our libraries at Creek, Point and Prairie High. In these libraries, and many others around the country, genre based shelving is primarily done in the fiction section. However, since Hill is starting from scratch, we will be completely genre based in fiction, non-fiction, and picture books. 

The purpose of genre based shelving is to help students and staff be able to find books easier. We won’t have to spend a lot of time looking up books on the computer, because everything will be organized in a very logical way. If you are looking for a mystery, you’ll simply go to the mystery section. If you are looking for a book about immigration, there’s a section for that. I’ve tried my best to create non-fiction sections based on our curriculum, but obviously there are others, too. It will take a little time to get used to, but I truly believe it will be so much easier for everyone to locate resources, and even just to browse. 

I’ve started creating signage for the fiction & picture book sections. I’ve attached the link to the Google Presentation in case you want to look at it. I’m open to suggestions about wording or anything else you notice. There are 10 fiction sections (I’m going to move classics into their true genres) and 18 picture book sections, plus a “general” picture book sections for the few books that were hard to place. The “favorites” picture book section I will probably end up moving to their true genre as well. There were some things that I didn’t catch while create the categories, and as you can imagine, it was a lot of work to pre-sort the books into their categories and make those final decisions. Luckily, everything is flexible!

There are around 140 non-fiction sections. The signage for these will be much more simple, as they are more self-explanatory. They will be smaller and contain the name of the section & hopefully a picture or symbol that explains the category. I’ve attached the list that has all of the genres/categories for your information. However, it will be much easier for you just to stop in and see the library when we get going!

Also, the data is currently importing into the library catalog. It will take another hour or so to finish, but you are able to look up books right away! 

Here is the Google Doc that has all of our genres/categories listed.

Here is the Presentation with the genre signage. 

Here is the link to our Destiny catalog.