This month's post by Manitowoc (WI) Public Library Youth Librarian and YSS Board Member Susie Menk is all about creative problem-solving to make collections more patron friendly and accessible! 
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
Have you ever had a teacher come in and ask you where all
your books on “The Gingerbread Man” are?
You walk to the 398.2 nonfiction section and stare at the books, hoping
that you will be able to spot the titles easily but it doesn’t work. You finally walk back to your desk and do a
search in the catalog, hoping that maybe a title search will suffice but to no
avail. Oh well, you tried, right?!
It seems that fairy tales are not an easy area to search by
shelf browsing or catalog. Familiar fairy tale titles often change if they are
from a different culture, and sometimes authors like to re-imagine fairy tales
and change not only the title, but also the characters. Oh boy, now how do you find them all? Of course, those of us who are expert
librarians can work around all this and find what our patrons need. But, what about making it easier for the
patrons to search themselves? How can we
do that????
This past year I worked with my team to reorganize our fairy
tale section to make it more user-friendly.
I started by getting a title list of this section to determine what
fairy tales we have and how many versions of each we have. I wanted to stick with the more familiar
tales but also make sure that alternate versions or re-tellings were
included. I developed a list of the most
familiar tales and then worked out a system for the spine labels. In order to keep the fairy tales grouped
together, the call number includes the name of the fairy tale. For instance, stories about “Snow White” or
the “Little Red Hen” are labeled as 398.2 SNOWWHITE or 398.2 REDHEN. This allows the books to still stay in the
fairy tale section but keeps all books about the same fairy tale together.
It is a cross between Dewey Decimal and picture book city
groups. Picture book city (see article
here) groups books by topics to keep like books together. So all the princess books or dinosaur books
are in the same area on the shelves.
This re-cataloguing of the fairy tale section has the same goal—keep the
same fairy tales together, BUT keep the books in the non-fiction section.
Now when patrons or teachers or students come in looking for
ALL the versions of “The Gingerbread Man”, it will be simple to find—398.2
GINGERBREAD. How wonderful!
Just a funny side note—want to guess which fairy tale has
the most versions? If you guessed
“Cinderella”, you would be right! Our
library has 36 different versions of this fairy tale with
variations from all over the world.
Cinderella is obviously the gold standard when it comes to fairy tales!
1 comment:
I did this, too! The kids would come in looking for princesses, mermaids, fairies, unicorns, and "scary stories". So I have my Cinderella books under 398.2 PRI CIN, my mermaid stories under 389.2 MER ABC, unicorns under J 398.245 UNI ABC, and all of the collections of scary stories, plus scary series that are not collections, are under J 398.25 ABC. This makes it so much easier to find exactly what the patron wants. Though, I like your idea of using the fairy tale's whole title in the call number, like "Gingerbread". Sometimes my staff have a hard time shelving correctly with so many separate letters on the spine.
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