We Did It! Genre Shelved MS Fiction Collection - And it was worth it!

The journey to genre-shelving our middle school fiction collection started, two years ago, during my first year as a librarian.  Initially, I was inspired by other librarians’ journeys with genre-shelving and thought it might be a great idea, yet an overwhelming prospect.  As my first year progressed and I watched our middle school students wander around the the MS fiction collection without a plan - I thought there had to be a better way to find a great book to read.  Even with the many reader advisory lists I made available to students, having the collection organized by author’s last name made browsing a very hit or miss activity for most. The final push to genre shelving came when the English and Spanish teachers adopted a balanced literacy approach to teaching reading and literature.  Essentially, every child reads a ‘good fit’ book of their choice and uses that book to build skills, etc... This made the decision to genre shelve a no-brainer.  The question was how to do it efficiently and correctly.  After browsing many other librarians blogs and tips, I decided to re-catalogue and make new spine labels for all the books in the collection.  My favorite laugh during this process was when one of the teachers asked how long it would take, ‘one weekend?’

Once we got started, it took approximately 4 months with the help of a dedicated parent volunteer.  As I am the only librarian, it could not have been done without this assistance.

How did we do it?

-First, we did an aggressive weeding of old and irrelevant titles.

-Then I met with the Language Arts teachers and decided on seven genre categories. This was tough as there are so many ways to categorize, and led to many great debates. In the end, we decided to not have too many genres, and fortunately, teachers are using the same distinctions in their classroom libraries.  

-We began to re-catalogue each book.  In Destiny, we changed each call number, made new spine labels and color coded the genres.  This step took the longest amount of time.  As books were returned, we re-coded them and slowly moved through the stacks. Once we had changed 95% of the books we had a moving day to sort the books according to genre.  It was much more fun than I expected. It took three of us about two hours to put every book in its new home.

-The collection now has 2000 current titles.

-We found that our fantasy/science fiction section was quite large, So we tagged dystopians and 

sci fi with an additional sticker.

-New signage matched the color of the genres.

-We finished in June 2015.

-This school year, we kicked off with opening orientations for the MS classes.

-Our genres are (see spine label example below): 

adventure/action/sports, humor, fantasy/science fiction, realistic fiction, 
historical fiction, mysteries/suspense and romance/relationship

So far the results are great. Student response is very positive and many have commented on how the new system makes it easier to discover new reads. It has also supported the conversations I have with young readers about their interests and allows for me to ‘push’ new genres given their interests.  For example, one reader who had enjoyed many of our sports fiction was encouraged to pick up a mystery with a sports setting. He loved it. Genre shelving also lets me assess our needs quickly, as it is evident which genres are most popular and which need more titles. I am looking forward to observing more benefits from our genre shelved MS fiction collection as the year goes on.  For now, it is wonderful to watch our students develop more independence as readers. And this year, we tackle genre shelving the Spanish MS fiction collection.

Note: ASFG’s upper school library serves a bilingual community of learners in grades 5-12 and our parent community. We have an English MS fiction collection, HS/adult fiction collection, Spanish MS fiction collection and a HS/adult Spanish fiction collection.  In Non-fiction, English and Spanish titles are shelved together.
Special Thanks to - Jennie Kies and Alicia Marigliano