Greetings!
I recently got a question regarding the older Adventist mission books and where it would be best to place them. This is a great question since we all have these old books and many of them are treasures.
I then realized that most of us have quite a collection of religious books and probably add to this section regularly. Here is a breakdown of the 200 section of Dewey for the categories you will use most often and books that might be included there.
220.5 – Bibles. This is the official place for Bibles according to Dewey.
220.9 – Bible stories that cover the Bible - both Old and New Testament. If you want to separate the Old Testament stories from the New Testament stories, you can use the next two divisions.
221.9 – Stories about Old Testament characters and other Old Testament stories
225.9 – Stories about New Testament characters and other New Testament stories
232 – Jesus and His family. You may decide to put stories about Jesus in the 225.9 section instead, but if you wish to separate these you can do it here.
242 –Devotional books. If you wish to separate your daily devotional books from devotional books that don’t have a daily reading, you can put daily devotionals in 242.2
248 – Christian experience and life – I hesitate to put this category in, but if you decide to use this, I would encourage you to only put adult books here such as Paint Your World. (I would not put children’s books here even if they seem to fit because this section is often ignored by children. I would put children’s books in either the story section or the Everybody Books section depending on the reading level.)
266 – Mission stories. Put all mission stories here, old and new.
270 – Early church history. Books about the early church such as the Waldenses would go here.
280 – Other Christian denominations
286.7 – Adventist section. I believe that it is important to put the decimal for this section to separate Adventist books. The number 286 is for Baptist, Disciples of Christ, and Adventist religions.
290 – Other religions, non Christian
Now what do you want to do with stories like the Uncle Arthur Bedtime stories? You might be tempted to put them in the 248 section, but I have already mentioned that that section is likely to be ignored or overlooked. I would advise you to put stories in the 813 section. That is the section that most children gravitate towards and these books will be seen and more likely used if there are in with the stories. However, you could put them in a separate section for collections of stories. If you want a collected story section, use 808 for it. We put Uncle Arthur books there along with the Guide collections of stories, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul books and other books that have individual stories in them. Since we are already in the 800 section, here is a breakdown of that section for you as well. (If you have literature from countries other than America, email me for that category if you need it.)
808 – Collected stories
808.8 – Poetry
813 – Stories. (The official title is American literature of fiction, but we either call it stories or literature for our students.)
One new thing I have noticed is that our Adventist publishers are beginning to put decimals after the 813 on some books. For example, the new Serenity series by Kay Rizzo has the number 813.54. I don’t know what the decimals stand for since Dewey does not have any decimal divisions for 813. You don’t have to use the decimals after 813 if you don’t want to.
Well, I hope this has been helpful to you. I have readers who faithfully save these emails in a folder to refer to later, but you don’t have to do that. I post each email on my blog and you can access it there if you want to. Just go to sdalibrarian.blogspot.com and you will find all the posts from January 2009 and since.
Happy reading!
Audrey
