It's Time! We Are Moving Our Fiction Into The Genre Neighborhoods!

This afternoon, Diana and I had a little brainstorming session in the library.  You see....it is time to MOVE our fiction into the different genre neighborhoods!

Diana asked me, "So, how do you think we should organize the different genres?"  I answered, "Do you think we should alphabetize them? Or should we group together similar genres and lay them out as we want within the fiction section of the library?" 

After sitting down with the genre classification stickers, this piece of paper,  and a few of the books that Diana cataloged today, we decided to group the genres together and come up with an organization based on similarities, natural flow from genre to genre, and the popular traffic spots within our library.

As I wrote in the post Reorganizing The Fiction Within Our Library And Destiny's Visual Search, this is a big step in the total reorganization of our elementary library collection this year at Van Meter.  After we "Ditched the Dewey" and reorganized the nonfiction into categories or the "book store model", we soon knew that the fiction would be next.

One of the most popular questions that I hear each week is, "Mrs. Miller, where do I find the Realistic Fiction?  Where do I find the Ghost Stories?"  With the reorganization of the fiction, just think how easy it will be for students to find what they are looking for with the genre neighborhoods.

Diana in the middle of "Historical Fiction."  

She also worked on the books within the "Mystery" neighborhood today.  She went through all of the books within our fiction collection.  Next,  she updated the MARC record for each so the books will be searchable within each genre and put the "Mystery" genre classification label at the top of each book's spine.  The books look amazing....I just love how great the new stickers look and how easy they are to identify which genre each book belongs to.  

I love how excited Diana is for this reorganization too.  She has been at Van Meter for 18 years now and this is the first time that she has made a drastic change to the collection.

She even mentioned today that it is so nice going through each book within Destiny as she updates each MARC record.  When she is finished with the reorganization project, she will have went to every book in the library within Destiny and updated each one....This has never been done and she is finding things that she is changing as she goes.  It is like our entire collection, inside and out, is getting an update!

Tonight as I created the signage for the different genres, I made them very simple to read from even across the library.  

                             

I also took the image of each "Genre Classification Label" from DEMCO that we used on the spines of the books and placed them next to the words.  This would give all of the students a visual as well as written words when looking for books within a certain genre neighborhood.   

And as I spoke about in the first post above the reorganization within our Destiny, I have added several "Visual Search" categories with little images of the genre classification labels attached.  

Just think how fun this will be for the students to learn about as we move into these different genre neighborhoods.  

This move within our fiction will be so well received by our school community....I cannot wait to see how it will change what the students and teachers check out, how much they read, and the excitement of finding books within the same genre that they love or venturing into a new one.