Historical fiction

2014 Reading challenge

I've joined the challenge for 2014 at Historical Tapestry. This is my favourite genre and by joining the challenge I will be reminded to write reviews for each of the titles I read. I'm aiming for the Ancient History level of 25 historical novels in 2014.

My Historical Fiction tag in LibraryThing reveals that I read 23 in this genre in the last 12 months but I did not write reviews. Here's hoping for a year of great reads.
The first three lined up are Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, Fiona McIntosh's The Tailor's Girl and The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin.

What will you be reading this year?

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.

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?