Organizing your collection
In my school library, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make it easier for students to find “the right book.” I’m curious what other librarians have done (or considered doing) to improve access, make the shelves attractive, and help students browse effectively. Any ideas?
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Last spring I created a special section for “Series Fiction” in my elementary school library. I drew books from both my fiction and “Everybody” (picture book) sections. We have AR at my school and books are tagged, but not sorted by reading level (which I don’t want to do). To some extent my Series shelves are a compromise, allowing transitional level readers to easily find chapter books that they can read (from Henry and Mudge, Junie B. Jones, Magic Tree House, to Bailey School, Judy Moody, Hank Zipzer, etc.). Hopefully, by helping more kids get hooked on a series, I can also help them build reading fluency.
–Sean
Saw Jim Trelease (The ReadAloud Handbook) give a talk a couple months ago. He suggests shelving as many books as possible with the cover facing out- like cereal boxes at the grocery store (or books at B+N, for that matter). This is tough in my library, on open space with few walls available for displaying books. Nonetheless, I bought some inexpensive book easels and set them out along any empty shelf space. I have found the books I display in this way tend to circulate more.
I put several genre signs up in my fiction section (fantasy, animal fiction, action/adventure, humor, sci-fi, sports, etc). The books that are clustered around each sign change frequently because students are constantly grabbing these visible titles when browsing.
In non-fiction, I’d like to be able to free up a little space on the end of every shelf to be able to display books there too with the cover visible. I think that this could be a great way to make the Dewey organization more visual, since each subject’s shelf would have at least one representative title displayed.
–Sean
Yeah, I think Genre-shelving (aww, let’s just call it “Barnes & Noble style” or maybe “The Death of Dewey”
has a lot going for it. I’m going to play with using Shelfari on my OPAC machines to do some virtual genre shelving, I’ll report back on how well that works.
I haven’t done it for non-fiction, but I’ve built small bookshelves for the bookcase ends, pretty similar to what you describe above. They’re for paperbacks– at least half of each shelf will be filled by books with the cover facing out.
For non-fiction I’ve used the aforementioned easels to fill the *top* of the bookshelves, keeping the displayed books above the appropriate area where it’d otherwise be found.
I have to say I’m amazed by the extent to which I’m seeing the books that I’ve displayed *cover-out* circulating. In other words, those books that I’ve placed on easels or facing out on my new paperback shelves are getting checked out at a far greater rate than those placed spine out. Kinda cool actually- makes it a piece of cake to ‘push’ certain books- without even book talking them!
Tangential thought, here. I’ve also noticed, with some dismay, how many 400 page books are coming back after a few days, almost certainly unread or at least unfinished. I’d like to up the percentage of books checked out that are actually getting read, and I wonder both about generating statistics to track that and what strategies people have to make it happen, while preserving student choice. I know people like AR for this reason- I wonder what are other ways to make it happen.
Carter,
I put up a few pictures at the Flickr link above, but I forgot to shoot any of the genre clusters. I’ll try to get those up next week.
Oops, to see the Flickr library pictures link, click on the name “Sean”
http://flickr.com/photos/31092638@N07/
Oh, cool, I’ll go take a look.
I like this idea! set