Genre-fying the Collection, Part I

Last fall we opened a new 7th and 8th grade building, and at the time, we secondary teacher librarians decided that after years of talking about genre-fying a collection, this would be a good time to do so. With brand new shelving and boxes & boxes of books, it seemed like the time was right to organize the new building's collection into genres. The librarian there worked closely with our vendor and rep, who was very helpful, and when the building opened last August, students had a genre-fied collection.

After talking with the librarian throughout the year about student browsing, enthusiasm, self-sufficiency, and circulation numbers, I decided to genre-fy the high school collection as well. Incoming freshmen will already be familiar with a collection organized in this way, and returning high school students will now be able to browse according to the genres they often ask about.

Before I started this work, the fiction collection was arranged alphabetically by author. Only graphic novels and nonfiction were separated out.

First, I worked with the librarian in the new building to align my genres to hers, and shelf signage and spine label colors will also match as closely as we're able to do so. Altogether, the high school collection will have eight genre-fied sections: realistic fiction, thriller/suspense, adventure, sports fiction, historical fiction, supernatural, fantasy, and science fiction. Then, I too talked with our vendor representative, who helped answer questions I had and arranged for me a spreadsheet of the fiction collection. 

The original spreadsheet was overwhelming and too much to consider--really, what I wanted to see were titles and recommended genres. I added genre-specific pages to the original sheet and hid columns I didn't need to see.

Then, it was time to pull books--lots and lots of books! Realistic fiction was going to be the largest of the sections, and I knew I wanted these books to line the bookcases along the wall, so rather than pull any of these books, I pulled books from all of the other genres. Over the course of two work days, I stacked books into piles, leaving realistic fiction books on the shelves.

Of course, before I shifted everything remaining on the shelves to the long wall, I walked the cases again to make sure that only realistic fiction remained, which was not the case. I spent part of a morning making these decisions and adding books to their appropriate genres before moving everything over to the long wall. This is where all of the realistic fiction books are now located.

With realistic fiction moved onto cases, it was time to turn my attention to the rest of the genres. While the spreadsheets gave me a rough idea of how many books would be in each genre, I wanted to have a better count, especially after moving around so many books. In some cases, the original number and what I ended up with were within 1-5 books; in other cases, I was off by dozens! The counting definitely took a lot of time, but I was glad to have taken the time. 

Since I could use the realistic fiction shelves as a guide, I could estimate how many books per shelf I could put in the rest of the cases, so the rest just came down to the math. I counted shelves, wrote genres on Post-It notes, and just played around with where books should go. In the end, I only had to switch around two of the genres when I started placing books on shelves.

Thrillers/suspenseful reads filled one side of a short cases:

On the opposite side are the adventure books and sports fiction. Intentionally, I left a column of shelves empty to allow for signage and displays.

The second short case has the fantasy on one side, along with empty space, and the historical fiction and supernatural on the other side.

With empty shelves spread throughout the cases, the long case that used to hold W - Z of the fiction and the graphic novels will now house science fiction, with two shelves remaining open to allow for growth and collection development.

Once the books were all back on shelves in the genres, I created resources lists with the same names and scanned books into the appropriate lists. This will allow me at a later time to assign sublocations to these books in the catalog.

So what remains? A whole lot of signage! I plan to use signage that matches or closely matches the signage at our new building, so I will need to work with my colleague to get this signage or to create new signage. These posters will be in colors that I plan to use as "markers" for each genre. Rather than put a descriptive label somewhere on the spines of the books, I have translucent, colored circle stickers to place over the spine labels. These colors match the colors on the signage.

But that's for another week this summer--it's time to take a break and enjoy family, friends, and travel before coming back to this work later this month or maybe even July. Stay tuned for the progress!