Thursday, 23 February 2012

Organising by Genre - The Process


This term we've been working diligently to reorganise our fiction collection into popular genres. My previous post Finding Fiction Fast covers our decision making. The process needs careful consideration before embarking on this labour intensive task. Here's an outline of how we have approached the task and some recommendations for implementation.

  • Choose one genre.
  • Remove from shelves alphabetically to trolleys or alternate shelf space.
  • Do a quick weed of the genre.
  • Scan barcodes to globally alter necessary data in your catalogue. Our Destiny catalogue facilitated the global addition of Categories (in this case used for genres.)
  • Generate new labels and attach to books. Our labels now have the new genre before the Fiction indicator, so Harry Potter in Fantasy is FAN F ROW and The Recruit in Action and Adventure is ACT F MUC. This allows our students to use the wonderful shelf browse feature built into Destiny.
    Visual shelf browse ACT F MUC
    Each genre also has a visual label

  • Reshelve - this may involve moving the rest of your fiction back to create space. We found this to be the most labour intensive part of the whole exercise, and it often required moving books back progressively as we addressed each new genre.
  • Relabel the shelves with signage that indicates what the genre covers and where authors are located. We did this with signs on the end of shelves, authors' names along the shelves and an alphabet indicator at the beginning of each shelf. We also added colour coding within our shelf strips to clearly indicate where one genre ends and another begins. Orange shelves contain Other Worlds, green is Action and Adventure, black is Horror and so on.
  • Provide signage above your OPAC terminals to indicate what the new call numbers mean along with colour coding if you decide to take this path.
  • Offer lots of help to your customers as they search for books using the newly relocated materials.Seek their opinion and feedback, some of our students are delighted others less so. We're still working on ways to improve their experience, but at this stage we are confident our newly reorganised shelves are attractive and provide easier access to popular materials whilst exposing other authors in similar genres who  were previously neglected.

1 comment:

  1. It is a huge process - we are following a similar process to what you have described to change our fiction into genres. We hope to finish by the end of this term. Thanks for sharing!

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