Where to Start?

I started with pretty close to 2000 picture books in the "Easy Fiction" section. I would just like to make it known that I do not like the term "easy books" for picture books because some of them are HARD!

First, I decided to get rid of a space hog, our audio-picture books shelf. There are about 70 of them housed in a four foot by two foot shelf; I say waste of space, especially when every square inch counts! I took those audio-picture books and will incorporate them in with the other picture books and add a fluorescent orange sticker to indicate presence of CD (this also got rid of both of our books on tape). I am also adding non-fiction picture books into the new collection, but am not sure how many titles that will be. I will have to reevaluate the numbers when all is said and done.

I started with the books with CD's and then started pulling non-fiction when I realized there was nowhere to put the books when they were re-labeled! I stopped pulling the non-fiction and  I started with Favorites instead because it was easy to make a list for our student worker to pull them from and it made a lot of room on the shelves for our new categories, especially in the B's (Arthur, Clifford, & Brett).

These were the easiest books to pull, and not a lot of hard choices for the FAVORITES! I browsed through the stacks looking for large chunks by specific authors, or popular characters and made a list. I sat down with the staff and had them think about what books they thought were "popular" with our patrons. When the list was finished, I had our library student pull them all. While she was pulling, I was stickering and labeling the books. Then I printed off a list of the Caldecott medal winning books and collected all of them as well. Right now we have five shelves of favorites, but they are crammed together until there is more room as books are moved for relabeling.

After the Favorites were pulled, I had a middle school volunteer pull all of the books with holiday stickers on them. These were also easy to identify and helped make a lot of extra room on our shelves. I was able to shift all of the remaining books down a shelf and leave the tops of the shelves open for the newly categorized books!

As a side note: we had a dog in to the library today for a Read to a Dog and some of the kids wanted dog books to read to the dog. EASY PEASY!!! I walked right over to animals, sub-category pets and there were all of the dog books! It took me less than ten seconds to pull ten dog books :) A few minutes later one of the kiddos who had been reading to the dog wanted more dog books. I was busy at the desk and couldn't help them, but she walked over to the general area and the lady with the dog pointed out the animal section to her (I was over-listening) and less than a minute later they walked away with two more dog books!