written by Katie Byerly
We here at the Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall offer a variety of items to check out.
In our collection of books, we have adult books categorized into fiction, nonfiction, large print, and paperbacks.
If you look at the fiction section, each book is marked with a call number that starts with the letters “FIC.”
But you might notice some books are also marked with a “Mystery” sticker.
None of the other books have these classification labels on them.
Why is this? We used to have a separate section in the library for mystery books and another section for fiction books.
We combined the two sections years ago. Since then, all of our adult fiction books have been shelved together regardless of the book’s genre.
But now that’s about to change.
In response to frequent community requests, we decided to separate our adult fiction books into certain sections by genre.
Our adult fiction genres will ultimately include romance, urban fiction, historical fiction, sci-fi/fantasy and mystery.
Books that don’t fall into one of those genres will continue to be just marked as fiction.
I believe this will help patrons find a book within the genre they’re seeking and for library staff to point them in the right direction.
Our circulation staff is often asked questions about genre shelving. For example: “Do you have a section with historical fiction?”
We then must tell them, “No we don’t, but we are working on that project as we speak. In the meantime, we can look in the catalog to see what we do have.”
However, once we complete this project, it will be much easier for patrons to find what they are looking for by simply browsing the shelves.
The circulation staff has been working on this project for about two months.
When we’re not busy checking out items or helping patrons, we take a stack of books from the shelves and look them up in our catalog.
From there, we look at the book’s record to see which genre it would fit.
Once we have labeled all of the books in the collection, we will rearrange them so all of the books from a genre are together on the shelf.
We’ve gotten through about 30% of our adult fiction collection by now and continue moving along.
I’m looking forward to our collection becoming easier to browse.
We hope it will help people find great books they might have otherwise overlooked.
Without the input and feedback from our patrons, we couldn’t have known this was something that people would like.
We’re always looking for better ways to meet the needs of our community.
If there’s something you’d like to see in the library, please let us know!
Katie Byerly is the public services manager at the Andrew Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall.