Picture Book Organization- Nature

Nature seemed like a natural category to have, with seasons and weather. I ended up with a few other subcategories. I ended up splitting food and plants up. Pizza isn't really a plant, but it is from nature, so. . . food! Creepy carrots could go in either, but since it wasn't really about growing carrots, and more about eating carrots it ended up in NATURE FOOD REYNOLDS.

These are the subcategories I used for Nature

Camping- we live in a touristy camping area.
Conservation- small, small section, but when Earth Day comes around they are easier to find.
Food-  food we eat, including plants that are being eaten or put in soups or on pizza.
Nature- water cycle, random nature love books, anything that doesn't fit into the other sub-categories.
Plants- Growing and harvesting go here, trees, flowers, and books about gardening.
Seasons- spring, summer, fall and winter are all here.
Weather- rain, wind, storms, tornadoes and other weather related books go in this section.

So where do those pesky apple books go? Seasons, food, plants? That is what I love about this organization system so much, it is flexible. If the book is not going out in seasons, I move it to food, or plants.

Picture Book Reorganization One Year Later

It has been a little over a year since we reorganized our chidren's picture books into their own scheme.

It has been a year of learning and a few changes. . .

Added general sub-categories
I had previously left a general book on a topic without a sub-category line. It was confusing for shelvers and library patrons. So now if a book has different types of animals, the spine label looks like this:

PANIMALS

ANIMALS

JENKINS

rather than:

PANIMALS 

JENKINS

Dropped Multi-Cultural Section
I felt this was an important area to set aside as a resource to share stories outside of our "rural white-bread" Wisconsin experience, emphasis an "I". I thought it might get ignored, but was hopeful people would seek them out. It turned out that our patrons did not check books out from this section as much as they did from some of the other categories. So now, they are on the shelf with the categories that they naturally fit in and will be stumbled upon: friends, family, behavior, stories, etc. This seems really obvious to me now, I'm not sure what I was thinking.

Longer call "numbers"
I had previously used FAVES for my FAVORITES to save space, but it seemed to be counter-intuitive to the whole "do it yourself without codes system" I left the old spine labels as is so we didn't have to buy and print thousands of new labels, but all of our new book spine labels now say: COMMUNITY, FAVORITES, & TRADITIONS instead of COMM, FAVES, and TRADS. All of the call numbers in the catalogs say the entire word, and that is where the patrons look to find where the books are located, problem fixed.

Kid friendly shelf labels
I made picture labels for the subcategories, I am more than happy to forward these on. I did a Google image search of each topic and found the cutest pics I could to put on display! They are just small pictures attached to poster board and covered with Contact Paper, they've been on the shelves almost 9 months and are holding up well.

Other library's adaptations
A few other libraries in our consortium have moved to this scheme over the past year! One of them sent an email out about dropping the P before the main categories.They felt that the colored spines did the trick for them in singling out the books, and I agree they do stick out, I was just worried about finding books on the OPAC.

I had initially planned on genrefying the juvenile chapter books by using colors somehow, which is another reason why I used the P to designate picture books. This project has still not happened as I have been unable to pull together my final vision of how it should look, but it is going to happen some day!

Bottom Line & Final Thoughts:

I would definitely do this again in a heartbeat! It is so much easier for kids to find the types of books they want, and it saves the library staff a ton of reference time.

I REALLY need to add some more princess books and a princess section.  This will just require a commitment. Do princess stories belong in with the Traditional Tales? the Favorites? or the Stories?  Only time will tell....

Picture Books: Six Months In

I was really freakin' nervous honored and privileged to present a session about our library's picture book reorganization project at the Wisconsin Library Association's Annual Conference! Now that some of the results are in, I can let the whole world know how it is going!

Comments from REAL patrons!

The increase in circulation numbers is awesome, but I had to take into account that everything in the children's collection is up as well. The difference between the two: 25%.

 I will let the numbers speak for themselves!

Picture Book Place- Animals

Major Category: Animals
Sub Categories: The subcategories were harder to come up with in this category. Dinosaurs was the easiest, but after that I had to do some hard thinking. I started by using major category of animal: Mammal, Bird, Fish, Insect, etc, but really didn't like how things were going. I ran into a lot of books about ducks in which there were also frogs, beavers and different insects. There were also books with polar bears, seals and fish together in them. I switched to sorting my books into habitat piles and ended up with Arctic, Woodland, Pond, Ocean, Pets and a pile of wild/zoo animals and insects/worms/spider type animals. I still wasn't completely happy with my piles.

I did not want stories of animals living in Africa in with the Zoo stories because those animals live in completely different environments. I ended up with an Africa pile, Rainforests, and Zoo. I decided to keep the creepy crawly things together and called them Crawlers because it fit on the spine label. The Rainforest books were a combination of South American, African, Asian, and Australian animals. I didn't want to confuse kids about which animals lived together, so I ended up pulling out the African and Australian animals and leaving the rest in the Rainforest group. Eventually I ended up with this list of subcategories.

• Africa-
• Arctic-
• Australia-
• Crawlers-
• Dinosaurs-
• Ocean-
• Pets-
• Pond-
• Rainforest-
• Woodland-
• Zoo-

Picture Book Place- Ourselves

Major Category: Ourselves

Subcategories:

• Behavior- bullying, taking care of books, wearing seat belts, manners, etc. all are here
• Confidence- Anything to do with believing in yourself, staying true to yourself, and/or being proud of you.
• Family- moms, dads, new sisters or brothers, grandmas, aunts, uncles. . .same sex parenting families, adoption. It all goes here.
• Feelings- feelings and how to deal with strong feelings go here.
• Friends- best friends, frenemies. . .
• Health- dental, body parts/systems/functions, doctor visits, excercising, etc.
• Routines- things that happen in kids daily lives like going to the bathroom, getting ready for bed, daily schedule type books.
• School- I debated putting this section into community, but figured most of the kids that come to the library will end up going to school someday; that is part of their everyday lives, so all of the going to school, and what happens during school books are here.

I DREADED working on this category. This category has a lot of ambiguous books. They could be behavior, but could also be friendship or family. I saved this one until the end. Piles of books about kids lives went into an even bigger pile to sort and separate later. When I had no other choice but to work on these books, I started grouping them by similar books and then the sub-categories emerged.

Picture Book Place- Fun & Games

Main Category: Fun & Games

Subcategories:

• Art- Books about drawing, painting and famous drawings and paintings. Also pottery, quilting and other types of art and creative
• Dance- all types of dance. Ballet, Lola's Fandango, and as you can see Dancing with Daddy.
• Music- Anything about instruments, music AND songs.
• Rhymes- Nursery Rhymes, Fingerplays, not basic rhyming books. I divided up the poetry to the other categories with the thought that it will probably get checked out more. For example a dinosaur poetry book will probably move more in dinosaurs than it would have if it were on these shelves.
• Sports- Anything sports related. Karate, Tennis, Baseball, Football, etc.
• Theater- Many of Auch's chicken books are here. Anything about being on stage or performing for an audience.

This category started out as Rhymes & Songs. There were only a small amount of books, and I had piles of sports and fine arts books that needed a home. I brain stormed with my co-workers to come up with commonalities for these books and we came up with hobbies, which led to Fun & Games.

Picture Book Place- Traditions

Major Category: TRADITIONS

Subcategories:

• Each holiday is its own subcategory. EARTH for Earth Day, MOTHER for Mother's Day
• BIRTHDAYS
• RELIGION- In one of the other libraires that I was looking at, they had placed Religious books in "Tales". This worried me a lot since we are located in a heavily Christian populated area. I think I found Traditions in METIS, thank goodness! It was a small stress point in the whole process. All of the Noah's Ark or other Christian based stories that mention "God" in them are in this section. There are also some books about Jewish families and customs in this section. There were not many "picture books" of the other different world religions.

This section was pretty easy to put books in. The categories are pretty straight forward.

PTRADS
MOTHERS
394.2MIL

Picture Book Place- Tales

Major Category Number Two: Tales.

There are no official subcategories in this area. This area contains all of the books that would be found in the Dewey section 398.2s along with their counterparts. Instead of subcategories, I used the major story title on the second line of the spine labels. For example: Cinderella, ThreePigs, Rapunzel, etc. The third line on the spine label is the last name of the author.

This was by far one of the easiest categories to put books into, they were either a folk or fairy tale, or they weren't.

Spine Label:

PTALES
CINDERELLA
STEPTOE

Picture Book Place - Favorites

Favorites is the first main category in our new picture book area. There is only one subcategory in Favorites:

• CALDECOTT: All of the Caldecott Medal Winners go here. They are arranged by the year that they won the award.

Also included in this section are:

• Favorite authors: Jan Brett, Eric Carle, Lois Ehlert, Mo Willems, etc. 
• Favorite characters: Berenstein Bears, Clifford, Curious George, etc.
• Classics: A Chair for My Mother, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, The Little House, etc.
• Popular Books: Disney, Dora, Lego, I Spy, etc.
• I also put some of my favorite read-alouds on these shelves for parents to find.

The books in this section were pretty easy to pull. If they were in Favorites, then EVERYTHING in that group went into Favorites. For example, Clifford's First Christmas is in the Favorites rather than the Traditions. The Hungry Catepillar is in Favorites rather than Animals.

The books in his section of the collection have two or three lines on the spine label. 

The first line is for the main category I used a P for Picture book before it, so it would read: PFAVES

The second line contains the subcategory (if there is one). For Favorites it would be CALDECOTT, or if it wasn't a Caldecott winner, the second line would just contain the author's last name and would read, for example REY. 

The third line of the spine label for the Caldecott winners is the year that it won the award. The two different spine labels for this section look like this:

PFAVES

CALDECOTT

2013

or

PFAVES

CARLE

This is the only section in which books with three lines on the spine label are placed on the shelves before the books with two lines on the spine label. Why? Because they are "winners" and "winners" don't belong on the bottom shelf.

Picture Book Place!

Okay, so this post is coming a little late. We finished up the bulk of the books last Friday. They have been slowly trickling in all week, but I'm pretty sure we are within a handful of books of being finished. Not much feedback this week.

Did I Say Finalized Categories?

Remember this post? Well, things are a changin'.

Here they are one more time:
Favorites, Tales, Traditions, Community, Ourselves, Transportation, Nature, Animals, Concepts and Stories. 

What's that you ask? What happened to Rhymes & Songs? I decided to kill it today and I felt WAY better after we made the decision.

On Wednesday my IFLS buddy, Leah, came out and helped me finish sorting the rest of my books! Thanks Leah!!! I was asking her about putting ballet into sports when she pulled out a book about an artist. "Fine Arts?" she asks. Wow and Duh! You think after spending four years of my life in a Fine Arts building on a college campus, I could have come up with that one, but I didn't and I loved it.

This brings me to today. My director, Kim, and I were talking about where to put the huge stack of Fine Arts books that I hadn't planned on having. Does it go in ourselves because it is something kids do? or does it go in Community because often times kids are going to dance classes or music lessons? I'm not sure how we came to the conclusion, but we came up with the idea of a Hobbies, or Fun & Games category. It will house Sports, Fine Arts and all of the Rhymes & Songs books. The poetry books will be sorted into the other categories where they will probably get checked out more anyway. There was only one shelf of Rhymes & Songs and this gets rid of my uneasiness about having Sports in Community and provides a home for my Fine Arts books. We put the question out to our cataloguer, Bridget, and will be finalizing the category heading tomorrow.

And the final category is. . . Fun & Games!

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!

Reorganization Project Snare

This is how they stand today: We have sorted and re-catalogued over 1000 books, so we are at least one third of the way there! I'm still struggling with animals and farm. 

I have some un-recatalogued animal books sitting in piles of African Savannah, Australia, and Rain forest. What's my problem? I can't decide if they should be their own category and I'm way over thinking things, or if I should just throw them in with the zoo animals because the only place kids around here are going to find animals like that is at a zoo... does anyone have any comments or suggestions they would like to make about it?

Also I haven't committed to adding farm to my Community category yet; they are all hiding in the back office on a shelf without a label :( I decided I didn't want to break up the animals, the farmers, or the tractors. All of those things are on a farm and they would all three be put in different places in the library. We are a farming community . . . but when patrons come in do they want the tractor books with the cow books? or would they rather find tractors with all of the other transportation books and cows in the animal section . . . anyone can also feel free to weigh in on this as well!

The Categories

I'm still tossing the subcategories around, but have decided on my main categories. I combined ideas from METIS, Storytime Katie, Gretchen Caserotti at the Darien Library, and Amy The Show Me Librarian to come up with my main subject areas. Here they are:

Ourselves: My Body, Growing Up, Family, Friendship, Emotions, Feelings
Concepts: Alphabet, Colors, Numbers, Shapes, Opposites
Favorites: Award Winners, Favorite Characters, Favorite Authors, Classics
Nature: Conservation, Food, Plants, Seasons, Weather
Animals: Birds, Fish & Water, Dinosaurs, Bugs & Crawlies, Farm, Pet, Zoo, Forest
Community: Biographies, History, Careers, Sports
Traditions: Birthdays, Holidays, Religion
Transportation: Air, Land, Water, Military
Tales: Fairy & Folk
Rhymes & Songs: Mother Goose, Nursery Rhymes, Poetry, Songs, Fingerplays
Stories: Everything else.

The main categories are finalized, it is the sub-categories I am still working out. I started this post about a week ago, and have already changed my mind about sub-categories. For example, when I got to the farm/ tractor/ farmer books I did not want to separate them. Hmmm. . . thinking about adding them to Community. Why? Probably half the kids in town live on a farm or have a grandparent with a farm which are all part of our. . . community. We'll see what happens after I sleep on it.

I think the decision making is one of the best and worst parts of this project. I make all the ultimate decisions and am free to make whatever categories I want. I try very hard to be thoughtful about this; thinking about how patrons will be looking for the books and I also talk at my co-workers constantly about how they would do it, but ultimately it is up to me. Waa! Haa! Haa!  It's all up to me!!!

Update March 23rd. I changed one of my main categories to Fun & Games.

Build it and they Will Come?

I have always organized my children's books by subject. I did it with my own home collection and I did it for two of the different childcare centers I have worked at. My categories were VERY specific, I had well over twenty or thirty different subjects for each of those three collections.

I'm not sure how I originally heard about the METIS system out in New York, but I started following the librarians who have worked on METIS about a year ago. I started to dream about reorganizing my own library into a more user friendly structure. Their organization made a lot of sense, and I liked how they incorporated non-fiction picture books in with fiction picture books to put everything in one easy access location.

In the past few months I have run across a few other systems that have been implemented in other libraries. One of the first systems I found was developed by Amy Koester at the Show Me Librarian. She called her's Picture Book City and color coded her books and used phrases for groups rather than using letters like METIS did. I loved this idea, yes colors are limiting, but I think that with my small collection, I won't have to go to a deeper level like the METIS team did and I can avoid using letters which is another representation system to learn.

I found the second system just recently in the past few weeks at Storytime Katie. She also chose to name her's Picture Book City and used colors to divide up her sections as well.

As I got closer to finalizing plans to begin this project, I ran across Gretchen Caserotti's slideshare slides for the reorganization she did at the Darien Library. Her slides were SUPER helpful in cementing my plans.

After a few conversations with the cataloger, director and outside eye I had my basics outlined and started to order the supplies I would need.

Jumping Off the Cliff

Yikes!! I did it!
And by I, I mean we, my fabulous co-workers and I. We took the first steps toward reorganizing our picture book section from alphabetical into (what I believe to be) a more user friendly system!

The stickers arrived, time to get stickering! 

Starting today there are officially books labeled for our very own Picture Book City. This is not the official name yet; we are still tossing around ideas and are open to suggestions. The books are being sorted by topic,color coded and re-shelved with their new spine labels as I type! There will be more info to come in future posts, but I just had to share because I'm nervous, and super excited, and nervous, and a control freak, and did I mention super nervous?

Here are some of the books on a cart waiting to be prepped  for our "Favorites" section.

Our first shelf just waiting for its books.