September: Genre Display

At the end of the last school year we completed our fiction genre-fying project. All the books were labeled and organized by genre. To start the new year, I decided to showcase the fact that our fiction section is now organized by genre with a genre display.

I used two of our bookcases to showcase the display. We have ten genres so I used five on one and five on the other. For the decor I used the same fonts that were used for the genre labels

I printed them out very large on colored paper (the colors of the actual labels) and then cut out each letter and taped it to the display, one genre per shelf.

I filled the shelf associated with each genre with books by that genre only. There was an extra shelf at the top and bottom of each bookcase, so I filled those with a mix of genres and added a sign on one bookcase that said "What's Your Favorite Genre?" and on the other bookcase that said "Our Fiction Section is Not Organized By Genre"

Cataloging: Genre-fying Our Fiction Collection (Part 2)

I am happy to say that we have now finished the genre project in the Upper School (High School), the process is still ongoing in the middle school, but we should be done next year. Here is how we went about finishing:

Once we had entered genres for about half of the titles in the catalog we put some parent and student volunteers on labeling. I printed out a new shelf list that showed the new call numbers with the genres on them. Started with "A" our volunteers began labeling. We played with the best way of completing this task. In the end having a cart available in the aisle and pulling books off one by one turned out to be the preferred method for the volunteers.

There are several choices for the labels on the books and we pursued each of them. I really liked the idea of using plain white labels or even cut pieces of paper and then purchasing colors label protectors. However, we did not want to have to reprint all our spine labels, we needed a solution that we could add to the books we currently had. I took the time to research pre-made genre labels from Demco and The Library Store. We came to the conclusion that most of the images on the labels fit elementary and middle schools more than high schools. I then chose to create labels myself using well known icons for each genre, yet when we printed them and tested them out on our current books, it covered up a lot of the title and/or the author. I then created skinny labels that just had the name of the genre. I used different fonts to try and portray what the genre was about (for horror I used a spooky looking text...). We then took the genre labels with the images I had made and the genre labels with just the text to our Library Advisory Board and let them vote. They chose the version with just the text. This worked out well because on the majority of our current books we could fit the genre label below the spine label and not cover more of the book than necessary.

I found some small, skinny labels from Planet Label. We went with a pack of Pastel colors and a pack of Brilliant colors. This gave us 12 colors to choose from (we only have 10 genres). I was also able to download the label template from the Planet Label website and then paste in the genre text image I had created. The labels we used are here. The colors we assigned to the genres are as follows: Adventure: bright yellow; Dystopian: lime green; Fantasy: raspberry; Historical: light yellow; Horror: greyish green;  Mystery: light grey; Realistic: greyish blue; Romance: neon pink; SciFi: neon blue; Sports: neon orange. Here are the text files if you want to use them for your project:

We decided to put the genre labels at the very bottom of the spine for each book. If an older book had a spine label that was too low, for the genre label to fit, then the volunteer would pull the book and I would reprint the spine label. This way when you look at a shelf of all one genre they line up with each other.

Moving the Books:
Once the cataloging was complete we moved on to moving the books. Before any book was moved I ran reports in Destiny. I ran an individual report for each genre so I knew approx. how many books were in each genre. I then went through the shelves and estimated each could fit 20 books on a shelf. I printed out a floor plan of the library and wrote in where each genre would go. It seemed like we would not have enough room so we made the decision to move where our graphic novels were located and that allowed us to open up an extra bookcase.

We then started by moving all the realistic books to the now empty graphic novel bookcase. Then we slowly pulled smaller genres off the shelves and put them on carts and a temporary bookcase that we rolled in for the moving process. Once most of the genres were off the shelves we were able to get the rest moved into their correct places and then add back in the ones we had pulled. We did run into a few issues when books just did not fit as we planned, but being flexible made the process go smoothly. With tons of help from the student volunteers we had the moving done in days!

Cataloging: Genre-fying our Fiction Collection (Part 1)

To Genre-fy or not to Genre-fy, that is the question we posed to our Library Advisory Board (a group of students and faculty who vote on any large decisions taking place in the library).

At the beginning of the school year I conducted research on the pros and cons of genre-fying our fiction collection. I read articles and blogs (Mrs. Readerpants, Living in a Library World, Fountain Reflections, to name a few) and I spoke to other librarians. We have a large collection of books, for the size of our school, and a healthy budget to purchase books, but our circulation statistics are no where near where we feel they should be. From what I have read and heard, it seemed like genre-fying our fiction section could help increase our circulation stats and also help us find gaps in our collection. Luckily the Library Advisory Board agreed and we began the long process of genre-fying our fiction books.

We have many parent volunteers and I was able to devote four volunteers to our project. We determined that the easiest way for us to complete this project was to print out a shelf list of all our fiction books in the Upper School (high school, we would deal with the middle school later). We are using online resources such as: Goodreads, Shelfari, Wordcat, Library of Congress, Amazon and Titlewave, to help us determine the genre of each book. We never pull a physical book off the shelf unless we can not determine the genre from any of the online resources.

Determining which MARC tags to use:
Our library uses Follett Destiny. Before we began entering information into the catalog, I contacted Follett to be sure we were using the correct MARC tag. I also followed up with a few google searches to be sure I was not missing something with the cataloging part of the project. I determined that we should use the 655 tag. It was repeatable and searchable through Destiny. For the indicators we used 7 and a. At the advice of Follett, on the second line we used our school code with the 2 indicator. (Follett said out school code would be useful when creating reports).

We chose the following 10 genres:
Fantasy, Dystopian, Science Fiction, Historical, Mystery, Adventure, Sports, Horror, Romance, and Realistic.

We also chose to add the following sub-genres: Mystery, Historical, Realistic, Romance, Paranormal, Supernatural, Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure, Bullying, Abuse, GLBTQ, Drugs, Tragedy, Short Stories, Thriller, Humor, Classics and Adult Fiction.

To catalog our sub-genres we also used the 655 tag and the 7 and a indicators. As you might notice several of our genres are also listed as sub-genres. To allow us to easily search the catalog for our books with, for example, Mystery as the main genre and not get books that had Mystery as the sub-genre, we chose to not add the school code in the second line of the 655 tag (as we did with the main genre). This way we could search Mystery and our school code and get only the books that had Mystery as the main genre. (If we just search for Mystery we would get all books that had Mystery as the main genre and/or the sub-genre).

Covering all our bases:
We chose to add the genre as the sub-location for each copy. This is easily done in Destiny by creating all ten genres as sub-locations. Sub-locations are options on some reports in Destiny and also shows up under Destiny Quest. After editing the MARC tag we would go under each copy of the title and change the sub-location. While under each copy we also added the genre to the front of the call number (Fantasy F GOC). By updating the call number we will be able to easily sort the books when we go to move them to their new locations. (It will also allow us to see any books we might have missed during the process).


To see how the project was completed read post two : Cataloging: Genre-fying Our Fiction Collection (Part 2)