Sunday 12 February 2012

Finding fiction fast!


The National Yearof Reading launch is this week. To celebrate reading and make our fiction more user friendly we are rearranging it into popular genres. We already have an extensive Graphic novel collection which is housed separately and which has proved to be very popular both for casual in house reading and borrowing. It is brightly labelled and easy to find and browse so we decided to extend this idea to the rest of the fiction collection.

We started this process towards the end of last year and after much discussion and definition decided on a range of genres to suit our student population of Year 7 -12 boys.

My colleague Tabatha Paterson researched various definitions of genres and we took advice from June Wall and Dianne Mackenzie both of whom had reorganised their fiction collections.

Genres
Our initial focus is on these areas.

  • Other Worlds
  • Fantasy
  • Action and adventure
  • Crime and Mystery
  • Horror
  • Short Stories and 
  • Humour
This leaves a general section which then encompasses 
a. Historical fiction Story with fictional characters and events in a historical setting. Some facts may be true, but story is usually fictionalised.
b. Realism A story which, although untrue, could actually happen. Some events, people, and places may even be real.
c. Classics
d. Literary A story that delves into the human condition in some way. It is character driven and emphasises elegant language.

My next post will cover the logistics of the process and a further explanation of each of the genres.

Happy reading to all!
What are you doing to promote reading this year?





3 comments:

  1. Sounds great Carmel. Will be interested to hear how it goes.

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  2. We are going to track borrowing and take stats (action research) to see if it does affect borrowing and reading. We have also started moving our senior fiction around, and it seems to have made an impact already.

    It is a lot of work, but I do think it is worth it. Good luck with it!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Dianne, it has taken us quite a while and definitely is a lot of work but early borrowing patterns indicate positive results at this stage.

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