Throw-it Thursday: What the Manga?!

Ashley Borman, Technical Services Librarian at the Clintonville (WI) Public Library, is back with another collection development column.

We recently separated our manga books from our graphic novels and gave them their own collection. It was not a terribly difficult process (unless your tech services department likes to be difficult, then it might get a little dicey), mostly because the collection is not overly large to begin with.

First, I ran a collection report to see all the books we had in our graphic novel collection. Then I went to the shelf and grabbed the books that were checked in and clearly manga. I took these back to my desk (it’s so much easier when you are the tech services department and you are the one who wants to create the collection!) and re-coded and re-labeled them. We got manga stickers to use instead of graphic novel stickers.

After I finished changing all of the books that were on the shelf, I went through the items on the list that were not on the shelf (checked out, in transit, lost, etc.) and placed holds on all of the items I knew were manga or thought might be manga. As they come back, I am re-labeling them and sticking them in their new section if that is where they belong.

Our new manga collection is small but beautiful!

The graphic novel section is now smaller, but it is easier to find things!

Throw-It Thursdays: Relabeling the Holidays

 Ashley Borman, Technical Services Librarian at the Clintonville (WI) Public Library, is back with another collection development - and weeding - column.

Do you have a Holiday section in your library? Are the Holiday books all listed under just “Holiday – Author Name”? How do you find the books you want for each season or holiday? When I started working at my current library, there was already a Holiday Section in the picture books. But it was chaos. Everything had the same generic green holiday sticker on it and was under the authors last name. It made things very difficult to find, especially for lesser known holidays.

A few years after I started, when I was settled in and comfortable with making changes, I talked to our children’s librarian and we started a fix to this issue. We bought specific holiday stickers for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Fourth of July (just a flag), Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We put these stickers over the Holiday sticker that was already on the item. Instead of putting them all back in alphabetical order, we put all of each of the specific Holidays with their own sticker on separate shelves.

After picture of the reorganized green holiday stickers next to the rest of the holiday books.

There are still a few shelves with the generic holiday sticker, but it made it much easier for us to identify and pull books for displays and teachers, and the kids love it because they can find what they want more quickly too. After almost 10 years, we decided the specific holiday stickers were no longer enough. Our generic green Holiday sticker shelves were getting stuffed, and we still had trouble finding all of the lesser-known holiday books for a specific holiday when we wanted or needed them.

Earlier this month, I pulled all of these books and did a weed based on condition, usage, et cetera. We discarded a lot of old and crusty books. To reorganize these items, we re-labeled them with the name of the holiday and the first initial of the author. So Groundhog Day books are all together under Groundhog, all of the Diwali books are together under Diwali, Hanukkah under Hanukkah, and so on. It is now so much neater and more organized, and specific holidays are a breeze to find!

Closer view of one of the newly re-organized shelves.

Down with Dewey?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I attended a session at WLA in Green Bay in November of last year about the Whitefish Bay's Book Seek classification system for their nonfiction collection presented by Valerie Morris. The gist of the session was the multitude of reasons that the Dewey Decimal System needs to go! This session inspired me to change how our children's nonfiction collection is classified (a work in progress). And, after doing more research into the negative side of the Dewey Decimal System, and its creator, I'm firmly on team Ditch Dewey! 

School Library Journal published an article in 2019 titled The Trouble with Dewey, which stated, "Dewey is in many ways an outdated mess. Racist and sexist, it classifies 'women's work' separately from jobs, and African American culture separately from American culture." And, those are only two examples of the problematic nature of continuing to use a system created by a biased creator over 150 years ago.

Is your library still using the Dewey Decimal System?

You can read the School Library Journal Article here: [The Trouble with Dewey. Marrocolla, Elisabeth. School Library Journal. 10/01/2019. https://www.slj.com/story/The-Trouble-with-Dewey-libraries]

For those of you interested in diving further into Dewey himself, I recommend: 

Racism in the Dewey Decimal System from Book Riot

ALA Votes to Strip Melvil Dewey's Name from its Top Honor from Publisher's Weekly

Move Over, Melvil! Momentum Grows to Eliminate Bias and Racims in the 145-year-old Dewey Decimal System from School Library Journal.

Bullet Journal for Book Lovers

Bullet Journals are the new thing in trying to organizing your life. There was even a session at WLA 2016 about it.  The blog Lifehacker offers a good summary of them for the uninitiated. 

People usually use the bullet journal system for to-do list, but BookRiot illustrates how book lovers can organize their reading lists.  I like the rating system shown in the post.  I see using it as a way to track of books I want to booktalk during summer library program promotion.

Have you used a bullet journal?  How?  Have you created a modified system?   Post in comments!

Organizing Picture Books by Subject

If you've ever heard the question - "Where are your truck books?" or "Where are your ABC books?" or "Do you have books about ...?" then you may have thought about organizing your picture books by subject. Patti from the Barron Public Library recently wrote about her experience creating subject access to picture books for the Indianhead Federated Library System blog Keeping Up With Kids. You can read that post here.

Picture Book Place

YSS member Kathy Larson, youth services librarian at the G.E. Bleskacek Family Memorial Library in Bloomer, is presenting a session a the WLA Conference this fall about her massive picture book reorganization project.  The session, "Picturing a New Way to Find Picture Books" will be held Friday at 10:45 am.  For more in-depth information about the Picture Book Place project, check out Kathy's excellent blog From the Short Stacks (which has great posts about a bunch of other stuff, too)

 To tickle your interest, we asked Kathy a few questions about her project and her presentation.

What made you decide to try this new arrangement for your picture books?

I’ve always organized my personal picture books by categories rather than author, it made topical books a lot easier to find (dinosaurs, apples, zoo). I restructured two different childcare centers libraries into that format at well. All of the teachers at the centers loved it because it made planning time so much faster. Once I saw that a few public libraries had done it in their libraries, I immediately started making plans to reorganize our library. I did not have the major categories in my personal library like some other libraries I have found, but it seemed to make sense to lump smaller categories together for the public.

What were some of your favorite resources for your project?

My main models were Picture BookCity, the METIS system developed by some librarians in NYC, and the Darien Public Library.   All of them are pinned to my Pinterest board (along with links to my own project).

 I took the main ideas from those three resources and looked at how they would work at our library, then moved them around a little, tweaked them a little and came up with my own system which I talk about extensively on my blog http://fromtheshortstacks.blogspot.com.

What are some of the cool things you plan to discuss at your WLA session?

I plan on talking about the process, the categories, how we went about processing and organizing the books, and how it is going so far. I love numbers and statistics so be on the lookout for some graphs!

Anything else you want to tell us?

It has been well received. For the most part books are easier to find when looking for a certain topic of books like frogs, bedtime stories, the Three Little Pigs books, trucks, dinosaurs, etc., I ran into problems when I wanted to do a fish storytime and had to look in Favorites, Concepts, and Pond (talk about annoying having to go to 3 different shelves for books!).