Color Us Thrilled!

Like most of you, we look closely at our collections, their arrangement and their kid-friendliness. We successfully morphed our Picture Book collection into Picture Book City "neighborhoods" and stopped fighting board books and made them 100% browseable in easy-to-access bins - both great "accessibility" decisions.

Since Alan, our new head of Collection Management (CM), started two years ago - and we changed our ILS - these types of changes have been far easier. Why? He has two kids and he really "gets" youth services. He knows how challenging big collections are for children seeking information and favorite books. The Dewey Decimal and multiple fiction collections with strange letters and symbols sitting atop author's last names and so.many.books.everywhere. can make a library visit overwhelming.

Our newest collection update was something that Al suggested as soon as he started working here. "Why," he mused, "don't you just color code the spine labels for your different fiction collections (early readers, graphic novels, chapter books, illustrated fiction)?" Why indeed. This coincided with an observation I made when I had first started. Since our catalog clearly spells out what particular fiction collection a book is located in (thank you automation), why do we need to even have a suffix (+, P, E, jgn or jif) as part of the call number in the catalog? We could save cataloging time by simply going suffix-less in the call number field.

Then, like peanut butter and chocolate running into each other and producing a peanut butter cup, we realized that if we took our two ideas (colored labels and no call number suffix on both books and in the catalog) we would save a ton of processing time and reach a hoped for goal- easy kids access. Al's idea sparked us!

We designated unique colors for each of our fiction collections - and while we were at it divided out our chapter book collection into tween and chapter books: early readers = pink; jgn = red; illustrated fiction = purple; chapter = green; tween =orange. Then we simply added the appropriately colored overlays to our existing collections and did global changes to wipe out the suffixes in the catalog's call number field (there's that slick new ILS!). All new books come down from CM without a suffix ((E, +, jgn, jif)  - the spine label simply has the first three letters of the author's last name or main entry. YS staff quickly determines which fiction collection each belongs in, puts on a colored overlay and batch updates the catalog.

Colored overlays show what collection books belong to. Top three books display sleek new suffix-less labels!

The results?

• Kids (and shelvers!) more easily can spot the types of books they are looking for. 
• The colored collections make a quick shorthand way for desk staffers to direct kids to books ("Let's find that in the red section where graphic novels are.") ,
• Our Collection Management catalogers and processors no longer have to agonize over exactly which collection a book fits in or do small batch processing to cope with the differences between fiction collection labels. 
• If we think a book would be better in a different collection, we simply make a quick change in overlays and a catalog update. 
• The overlays themselves - which we have used on other collections around the library - are long lasting but still peel-offable if we want to do a reclass of individual books.

Left: Illustrated fiction (purple labels). Right: Graphic Novels

A strong partnership with a visionary CM manager and a willing YS team made the difference in making this user friendly and more efficient library workflow change.

I think simplifying Dewey numbers may be next!

Covers and Spines - Valuable Real Estate

I am always bemused (sometimes to the point of tearing out my hair, so that could take me slightly beyond bemusement) by how little regard library and automation planners and apparatchiks give to the amazing real estate we know as book covers and spines. You get a cover and a spine to sell books to kids. It freaks me out to see how much of that libraries can cover to make the book anything from asinine to undecipherable.

Two hilarious and unfortunate barcode placements highlighted recently in Awful Library Books blog here and here are perfect examples of this practice. Automation folks say the barcode MUST go here and chaos and snickers result. Of course the argument also goes that if we put the barcode on the back, we'll lose the back jacket blurb.  I don't display the book backwards, though, so I harumphingly say, let the cover shine.

Full authors names on the spine are another bete noire of mine.  I have heard it blatted about that it helps shelvers by giving them the info they need to shelve correctly. I'll agree (although our college-aged shelvers seem to have no trouble dealing with three letters or less in shelving exactly alphabetically...could have something to do with their excellent predictive skills or more like, their ability to read the author's full name higher up on the spine where the publisher placed it so we could see the author's moniker) somewhat. But really,  kids looking at spine-out books get to see "The Secret"  or "A Series" or "My Friend" without seeing the whole title.  How do they choose?  My favorite spine label cover-up is for a multi-volume fiction series that displays the word "The" for each book - and no, it doesn't include the series volume on the spine label, so every book needs to be pulled out to find the desired title. How very un-fourth law of Ranganathan!

And save yourselves now and don't let me get started on endless dewey numbers in juvenile non-fiction collections.  Come on!  Except for mega - and I mean freakin' - big collections at large urban libraries, why are we extending dewey numbers beyond one decimal for kids?  They come in and want a dinosaur or lion or bug or horse or dog or truck book - and for 98% of the kids it's ANY book on this subject. They don't particularly want a certain NF author just a book on their passion. And they just want to find a book now. Long deweys mean they have to come to us (ah, it's a job security issue, not a cataloging one?) to unlock the mystery of the impossible long number. 

Libraries using a BISAC model or truncating Dewey and replacing the cutter line with a clearer indication of the subject (636.1 HORSE; 796 FOOTBALL or F; 599.7 LION or L) are my BFFs and heroes. And libraries honoring preschoolers by busting out big subject areas in the picture books into more friendly subjects that tots crave (princesses, concepts, "big teeth" dinosaurs, sharks and felines", transportation, celebrations, fairytales) have my undying gratitude and respect.

I say let the book covers and spines shine out.  Let kids find books easily by wise decisions in cataloging, processing and automation issues. Let those books be free!


Image: 'Finally got to make something with this+awesome+vintage+fabric' http://www.flickr.com/photos/63103685@N00/3023635136

Dewey...or Don't We?

I have been pretty excited to see libraries talking about and looking into adapting BISAC to use with non-fiction classification.  My buddy Ken Hall over at Fond du Lac Public Library is putting this into play at his library (and has a nice explanation here).  What calls to me about this system is that it still maintains subject organization but also invites the art of browsing to sing out as well.

Many, many years ago, at my former job, my visionary director Jack Fry and I concocted a heretical new  Dewey/Cuttering system that vastly simplified our kids NF collection and was easy to use. Although not quite as simple as the bookstore's BISAC, it incorporated the concept that kids are not necessarily looking for a specific book by a specific author in a subject section but rather books in general about the subject they are interested in.

I had watched for years as kids, parents and A+ student shelvers struggled to find and get the books they were looking for.  And as a borderline dyslexic, I had my own nightmares with transposed numbers in the great forest of Dewey's decimals.

So we tried to use no decimals at all or at very most, when push came to shove, one number beyond the decimal.  Rather than using the cutter to designate the author's last name, in sections where the decimals had been decimated (bwa-ha-ha-ha), we used a generic letter to separate types of books in a subject.  That reads like Greek to me so let me give a couple of examples.

Baseball's Dewey Decimal (DD) number is 796.357; football is 796.332; basketball is 796.323. So we designated sports books as 796.3 and put all baseball books as 796.3 B (B=baseball); football books as 796.3 F (F=football); all basketball books as 796.3 C (C= "court" sports); soccer as 796.3 S, etc. We chose not to include an author's name in the spine label, just subject of the book. These collections were totally browse-worthy.

Same in mammal books in the notorious 599.7, 599.6, 599.3 sections. Bears would be 599.7 B, big cats 599.7 F (feline), and onward.  We kept the same basic Dewey number but just gathered all books on bears into one designated number/letter and let the kids browse. We chose this formula in any section of the collection that had great long Dewey strings (crafts and animals spring to mind...we were never ever brave enough to tackle 398's. I'm afraid..they defeated me). We didn't assign the collection letter willy-nilly - we chose letters that matched the DD designation.  We just truncated it and translated it to be user-friendly.

Kids loved it, parents loved it, shelvers worshipped at our feet.  I always hoped this would catch on somewhere but catalogers were universally horrified and condemnatory and they control how we present stuff to our public (unless you were lucky like me to have a visionary director who said go for it and control of the cataloging...yes, I was cataloger AND children's librarian!). I always thought it was a shame.  It made me think about whether we listen hard enough in libraries to the folks who work with kids and know gobs more than people think we do (but that's another whole 800 posts worth!)

As to whether kids can handle more complex DD numbering in later years if not exposed or taught DD early? I have a hunch they can. Someone did a study years ago saying that the average reading level of a catalog was 6th grade and I figure decimals as an everyday skill is out there in upper elementary grades as it is..a time when kids are aging out into the wild blue yonder of the adult collection for their research. It's a bit like not teaching geometry until our minds can handle that level of mathematical visualization. It's not for most 4th graders.

It has always struck me as trez bizarre that while we want to organize the info for ease of use, we continue to make it very difficult for the average Joe and Jill to find the darn stuff. I am thrillingly happy that brave souls in libraries are finally seeing BISAC as the way to a future that honors organization but does it in a language that the general public is familiar with (although I must admit I do love making the analogy with kids on class visits that Dewey is just MY world language rather than Spanish or Japanese or German!).

I am all for making libraries easy to use so that we can follow one of my most favorite of Ranganathan's Rules: "Save the time of the reader"!

Image: '09-may-20'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/91255327@N00/3565110921