To Genre-fy... Part 2

Happy New Year!  Who can believe it is already 2014?

So when I left off in December, I was telling you about my genrefication project. I had gotten to the part where I was labeling all my book spines with the genre.  I have some 5th grade girls that come in the morning for a half an hour so I started making stacks of the books waiting to be labeled. It looked liked this.

Yes, it was a mess for a while.  But each morning the girls would come in, grab a stack of books and the sheet of labels (you can see the post-it-notes on the counter that tell them what genre) and labeled the books.  When the were finished with a stack, they would put them on the cart for my assistant to shelve still according to alphabetical order.

 Once all the labeling was done, the next step was for my 5th grade helpers to pull all the books off the shelves and sort them by genre on the floor.  They just made stacks and stack under signs I had posted.  Now my shelves looked like this.

And it totally freaked the kids out as wehy were walking in the halls.  Luckily, most of this part was happening during my book fair week so the kids were not checking out.

Once I figured out how much shelving each genre was going to need we started reshelving the books alphabetically by author within the genre.  We decided that the genres would be front and back on the shelves and that if a genre required more than one shelf we would push them together to make genre "islands".  I was a little worried because even though I had weeded more than 400 books during this process, we almost ran out of shelving.  Here is a picture of my sci-fi (obviously I need to beef up that genre).

But you csan see how much space there is that before was filled because we were going alphabetically.  Here is my realistic fiction "island".

I made different colored signs for each genre so that we could direct the kids as they were learning where the books were. "Look in the pink, humor section".  

Finally we were done!  We had a week before winter break so I can't really report yet as to how it is working but I do think once we get used to it, it will be GREAT!

To Genre-fy... Part 1

I did it! I actually genrefied my fiction collection. Back in October I posted that I was thinking about doing it.  After a week more of thinking about and convincing my assistant that it would be ok, we did it.  It took us about a month and at times I was thinking "What have I done?" but now I think it is going to be wonderful.  I was a huge undertaking and I weeded about 400 books in the process, but actually touching every one of my fiction books has been a real eye opener.  Here are the steps to what I did.

First, I needed to know what my genres were.  Lucky for me our middle schools have been genrefying also so I mostly went with they had already set in place with a few exceptions.  For example, they have a "Romance" genre and I wasn't going there.  They also have a "Horror" section which I call "Scary".  I wanted to add an "Animal Fiction" section for books with animals that drive the story like the Betty Birney Humphrey series, many of the books written by Bill Wallace, Black Beauty, etc.  After talking with some other elementary librarains to make sure I had a good agrument, I had to state my case to my director and get approval.  Our middle schools put animals that talk in Fantasy and animals that act like animals in their Genreral Fiction sections.  However, at the elementary level, I do have students that come and ask for chapter books about animals and so I felt like it was warrented.

Once I had my genres decided on, I had to figure out how I was going to label the books.  Demco has some genre stickers, but there were some that I didn't like and I was also afraid that they would discontinue them at some point and I would have to switch stickers.  So I decided to get white labels and make my own symbols.

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After making my labels, I starting pulling groups of books that I was sure about like the A to Z Mysteries, the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary, Andrew Clements books, the Animorphs series, etc.  I pulled those off the shelf, labeled them and then put them back in the original ABC order by author's last name since the kids were still checking out during this process I didn't want to move them books until I had all of them done.  

Once I had done the major clumps that I was sure about, I started in the "A's" and pulled a cart-ful of books and went through them one by one.  Some were very obvious and I knew right away what genre I would place them in, but I always checked one of my middle school libraries to see if they had the book and what genre they had put it in first.  I also looked in the subject headings, read the summaries, asked other librarians and then it occured to us to ask the kids :) For example, I was not sure where to put the Magic Tree House books and of course our middle schools didn't own those.  I thought they could be Historical, Sci-fi because of the time travel, or Adventure.  One of the other librarians and I were chatting on the phone about it and she happened to have some 3rd graders in the library at the time.  She called a few over and asked them why they liked the Magic Tree House books and they replied, "Because they go places!".  BINGO - Adventure it is.  From then on whenever I wasn't sure I would think where would the kids look for this book? 

(I decided this post would be too long all as one post, so look for part 2 in a week or so).

To Genre-fy or Not To Genre-fy

So I think I am going to create a little chaos in my library. Right now my fiction section looks like this

pretty, right?  Books shelved by author so the students can find the Rick Riordan books in the "Rs" and the Beverly Cleary books in the "Cs". But let's be real, how many times does a student ask, "Ms., Where are the Dan Gutman books?" because if they know the author is Dan Gutman, they know to find them in the "Gs". Don't they?  The questions that I get a hundred times a day are "Where are the scary books?" (Translation: where is a chapter book ghost story) or "Where are the adventure books?" (Translation: I just read one of the I Survived.. books and want something like that one).  

A few of the middle schools in my district have started to genre-fy their fiction collections... meaning to shelve the books by category - mystery, scary, adventure, fantasy, etc. I have always been against doing this because I felt like if I did it at my library, then when students go to other libraries that shelve by author they would be lost.  But the more that I think about it, and the more kids are asking about books by genre, I think it could be beneficial.  What do you think?  I'd love to hear about any experiences other librarians have had with genre-fying or thoughts about the subject.