Weekly Reflection 9
This week (May 27) was primarily taken up by moving books around slightly, and doing a massive reorganization of the sports section.
The smaller moving project was simply to move the horror section to a third set of shelves. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture after I moved them, but here is what it looked like before:
As you can see on the far left of that image, the mystery books also got shifted to a different section! That shelf used to be fantasy books, but is now mystery. “Funny” books are now where mysteries were, and the fantasy books fill that entire back corner, with adventure in a small nook that used to be filled with fantasy. The library has completely shifted from when I started at the end of March – the only sections that are in the same place are the graphic novels and the poetry! However, the current arrangement feels much more fluid and with the classes moving to the center of the room (switching places with the maker space) and additional chairs in the now entirely fantasy/sci-fi section to create a comfortable reading space, I think the library will be much more suited to having multiple groups in it at once.
The major project I worked on today was switching the historical fiction section with the sports books. While I was doing this, I suggested to Erin that the sports books get, essentially, genrefied by what sport they primarily focused on. Erin loved this idea, and so I got to it.
To organize these, I chose to start by creating piles and small sections based on what the specific sport seemed to be – such as snowboarding, or football, or martial arts. When there were only a couple of books in a section, I chose to combine them with a larger “genre” within the sports section, such as “winter sports” (for dog-sledding, snowboarding, skiing, ice-skating, etc.), or simply combining two sections, such as dance and gymnastics. This is what my final list ended up being, in order on the shelves:
General (Olympics, books about multiple sports stories, records, a history of women in sports, etc); Ancient Sports (gladiators and ancient Olympics, etc); Basketball; Baseball; Football (there were a lot of these); Soccer; Tennis (only two books, but no good section to combine it with); Winter Sports; Water Sports (swimming, surfing, etc); Vehicular Sports (car racing, airplanes, bicycles. I also put skydiving in here); Skateboarding (was large enough to merit its own ‘section’); Running/Track; Dance/Gymnastics; Martial Arts; Wrestling/Boxing; Mountain Climbing/Rock Climbing; Horseback Riding; and “Outdoor” sports (hunting and fishing)
There were a few head-scratchers that came up during sorting. There was a single book about deer hunting, a mis-classified book about a girl in crime school that ended up going over to the Mystery section (as that’s what the internet told me it should go under), a single book about South Africa and rugby, and a single book about poker. The deer hunting one was less out-of-place once a book about fishing turned up in the books to be re-shelved (the “outdoor” sports section) and the mis-classified book got put where it should have been in the first place (and will probably have better circulation now!). The rugby book just kind of got tucked in between football and soccer, since it is similar to both of those.
I admit I simply put the poker book on display so that I would not have to sort it at this time, since I stared at it for several minutes trying to figure out where to fit it in. There is likely a better place for it to go – perhaps in the non-fiction section – but I figured it could stay where it was for now.
Overall, I’m very pleased with how this turned out. The additional benefit to this is that it gives a better sense of what sports the library might want to expand on a little bit (like tennis and dance), or maybe weed a few out (like football). It also allows students easier access to books about sports that they are interested in or like, without needing to sort through a packed shelf sorted by author. I chose to simply combine non-fiction and fiction together for this, since it was a pretty even mix, but the spreading out by sport means that even if a few Dewey numbers are mixed together because of their authors (such as two karate books having a book about taekwondo between them) it is easier to find books regardless.
