Genre Shelving

Greetings!

I recently read an article in the March/April issue of Library Media Connection about a school that decided to go to genre shelving for their fiction books. This librarian had some good reasons as to why she decided to go that route and I began to think about this a little bit further.

Genre shelving is where you put books of a kind together. The Historical Fiction books would all be shelved together, the Mystery books together, the Adventure books together.
Some of the reasons this is a good idea include:

• Many students really do not grasp the concept of organizing books by author’s last name. Many do not even know the author’s last name.
• The other Dewey sections have books of a kind organized together, (the science books are together, the math books, and so on), and students seem to think that this also applies to the fiction section.
• Students who like stories about horses would find them all together and can easily find more to read.
• Some say that the library is used more when genre shelving is used over the traditional Dewey 813.

I talked with my library assistant about this idea and we discussed the pros and cons of this in our library. We already knew the pros from the article and came up with our own list of cons.

• We are working to teach the Dewey system to the students so they will become more independent in other libraries. I tell the children that if they like to read books about training dogs then they will always find them in 636.7 in any library. So this is a skill that will be helpful in the future.
• When students leave our school, they will be back in a library that uses Dewey, so they will have to learn to use Dewey anyway.
• We feel that putting books of a kind together may hamper the discovery of ANOTHER type of book that students might find while searching for the type they want. Students often read only one type of book and ignore all other genres. Genre shelving would encourage this even more.
• The genres that the article mentioned were “Paranormal, Dystopian, Fantasy, Girl, Guy-books guys like, Mysteries, Real life, Classics, Humor, and Historical fiction. You will already know that the paranormal, dystopian, and fantasy genres would not be in our library anyway. Most of our books are Real life, so that one was also out. We don’t like the idea of separating ‘girl’ reads from ‘guy’ reads. Girls will usually read books about guys, but guys might resist reading a book about girls. Separating them would only highlight a section of books for the boys to avoid. So basically that leaves Classics, Humor, and Historical fiction.

Yet the students still come and ask for an adventure book or a mystery book. We have taught them how to use the computer library catalog and that often works, but still. . . We finally hit upon a solution that we feel would work in our library. We will purchase genre stickers to place on the different genres that are most requested in our library.

About two years ago we had a number of classes searching for historical fiction for book reports, so at the time we bought genre stickers for that particular genre and marked about 200 of the books for quick choosing. We also told the students that there were many more and if they had a question about a particular book, they could check with the librarian or their teacher to see if it would be acceptable for the assignment. So that genre is obviously one that we will continue using. Other genres we will mark will be Classics, Adventure, Horses, Dogs, Cats, Mystery, and Holiday. Then we will wait and see if there are others that reveal themselves as students ask for them.

We feel that this idea will help solve the genre problem, and still maintain the Dewey system, and the chance that students will happen upon another type of book while searching for a particular genre.

Have a great week. I’m off to order genre stickers!
Audrey