Whew!! What a journey just this part has been so far. I haven’t written about this before, but we are in the process of genrefying our Fiction section in my high school library. The first step happened last spring, when we decided which genres we were going to use and how to go through the process. Here are the genres we decided on:
- Realistic & General (kind of a catch-all if needed)
- Mystery, Horror, & Suspense
- Science Fiction & Fantasy (am already thinking about eventually separating these 2 sections)
- Sports
- Action & Adventure
- Historical
- Urban
- Relationships & Romance
Last page!
I finished the last sheets of our shelf list this week, so I have now gone through every single fiction book we own and determined which genre it belongs in—no better way to familiarize yourself with your collection!
We did have some “special” collections from the previous librarian that I had incorporated into regular fiction that I still have to go through, but I am celebrating today anyway! 🙂
As I have been determining genres, I have then passed on the completed sheets to my lovely assistants and they have been actually applying the colored labels to the spines (see picture below) and they are also on the very last section. Wahoo! Each genre has a specific color label to go with it.
The biggest challenge thus far has just been making a judgement call when a book falls into more than one genre, which SO many of them do. I have struggled with some, but decided to just go with my gut. I introduced the new system to my Freshman class this week and they seemed intrigued. Hopefully, we will see a big boost in circulation. I will be tracking it closely and updating you later.
Last section!
Step 3: Changing the genre in the Library Catalog! We are just adding a genre code before the FIC prefix on all the titles (i.e. MH for Mystery, RG for Realistic, etc.), so a call number would like something like this: MH FIC BAN
Excited to get this done! More to come soon.
The Library Princess 