Cataloging Challenges

Greetings!

I get lots of questions about how to catalog certain kinds of books. Today I’m going to focus on the types of books that we all have in our libraries.
We all have mission books. These books belong in 266. When I go to help organize a school’s library, we use the 266 on the top of the spine label and the first three letters of the author’s last name on the bottom of the label.


We all have devotional books. Devotional books are cataloged in 242. If you want to separate out devotional books from daily devotional books you can catalog the daily devotional books as 242.2. Check out your shelf of devotional books. Chances are that you have 20 or more of these. Depending on how you use them, you could easily weed a few of these. If your local church has a church library, give the ones that are for adults to the church and keep the ones that are geared toward youth and children. Any devotional by ‘James A. Tucker’ is a keeper. There are two that I often see in the libraries – Nature Quest and Glimpses of God’s Love. These short devotional stories can also supplement your science curriculum.

Likely you all have inspirational stories such as the Chicken Soup series, Taste Berries, and similar types of books. These are not devotional books, but they do have individual short stories in them by different authors and many students enjoy reading them. If you look in the book, you may notice that the Chicken Soup series is cataloged as 158.1and Taste Berries is cataloged as 242.63. Some of you want to put these type of books together which makes it easier for students to find. If a student likes the Chicken Soup books, he might notice the others on the shelf and decide to try those, too. The Guide’s Greatest stories is a collection of reprinted stories along a theme such as Adventure, Angel, Miracles, etc. The Shoebox Kids is another series of stories that is published by our SDA publishing house and is similar to the Guide series. Some libraries put them in 221 so they are in the Religion section. If this works well for your library, that is perfectly fine.

We decided to catalog these sets in 808.8 which is Collected Stories. So this section in our library includes the Uncle Arthur books, The Children’s Hour set (also by Uncle Arthur), Shoebox Kids, and Guides’ Greatest stories, Chicken Soup series, and Taste Berries here along with other books that have individual stories in them. This puts them nearer the 813 section which is the section that children usually gravitate to anyway.

Hint: Guide’s Greatest stories have been put together by different editors, so if you want to keep this collection together, choose one editor and catalog them all by that editor’s name. We chose ‘Pec’ because Lori Peckham was the first editor of this series. As more came along with a different editor, we continued using ‘Pec’ so the set would be shelved together. Keep this in mind for other sets that you want to keep together.

Let me know if you have any cataloging issues or shelving challenges. I’m happy to try to help you solve these problems and make your library easier to use.

Have a great week.
Audrey