This post by Manitowoc (WI) Public Library Youth Librarian and YSS Board Member Susie Menk explores staff vs patron needs in placement of books in the collection. And she's wondering....what do you think?
So I would like to pose a question to you today. In libraries, the recent trend has been to
make collections more user friendly. Go
to subject headings and groupings of books by topics instead of by
authors. Hence our recently completed
picture book city cataloguing project.
We want our patrons to find the library easy to use so we have adapted
many of our traditions of cataloguing in favor of colorful, eye catching labels
and topical groupings similar to bookstores.
I am all for doing this to make our library a friendly place
for users. We want them to come in and
browse. We want the parents and children
and teens to be able to find books easily and without always asking a service
desk staff person. We want our BIPOC
populations and people with disabilities to enter our library and feel
comfortable searching our shelves. We want
people who are struggling with personal issues to find materials privately and
be able to come and go without having to interact with staff if they choose not
to.
So… when does what we do with cataloguing become more about
the patron and less about the staff and traditional library practices. Let me give you an example---I have been
working at re-cataloguing our youth graphic novel collection. If you have been following publishing trends,
you know that graphic novels for youth have been exploding onto the library
scene. There are fiction books that now
have a graphic novel counterpart. There are graphic novel series that are
historical or biographical in nature.
There are even science comics and fairy tale graphic novels.
While working on this
project, I found that we owned several graphic novels that were
biographies. Since I also worked on the
picture book city project, I naturally leaned toward putting the biographies
together in a group—just like we do in the 921’s and the way that I did in the
picture book collection. But then I ran
into a small roadblock. One of our
catalogers was not a fan of making our graphic novels into subject
groupings. Creating multiple headings
that needed to be entered into the catalog software would require extra work on
the part of the staff. Plus this person
was not comfortable with making another collection subject based. (In retrospect, I realized that most of the
cataloguing projects in the youth collection were my idea—not helpful ☺) I
wanted to make browsing simpler for the patrons and this person wanted to
follow traditional cataloguing rules.
My question then is this:
when does doing what makes library browsing easier for the patrons
overrule the work the staff must do to ensure the patrons have a great
experience? When is customer service
more important than traditional methods of cataloguing?
