Putting Dewey on a Diet

Last summer we weeded our print Reference collection and replaced it with a 400-volume set of Gale Virtual Reference Library reference books. Our users barely noticed, other than the fact that the library was now a more welcoming and customizable space. The Reference books had been on high shelves in the middle of the library. With those shelves gone, we were free to place mobile displays, rearrange tables, and create a large space for full staff meetings (which my Principal was thrilled with.) As administrators from other schools came by, they asked expectantly if I was getting rid of all of the books. “Who reads books anymore when we have the Internet?” was their view.

While I spent a great deal of time trying to customize our virtual library to make it more user-friendly, we rarely rearrange the physical library. Our fiction collection continued to be relevant and popular with our students but our nonfiction books were rarely touched. It got to the point that when I saw students browsing in the non-fiction shelves I thought “what’s wrong with that student? why are they over there? and what are they up to?” When a student or faculty member did ask me to help them find a nonfiction title, I felt myself cringing. One student asked me where the books on the Renaissance were kept. Gulp! 940.2 has the basic titles, but if you’re looking for Religion in the Renaissance, Women in the Renaissance, or Architecture in the Renaissance, it’s a different story. Students from Psychology class come in monthly to find memoirs of people with psychological disorders. While we did have some memoirs in a biography collection, most of them were filed under the Dewey number for the type of disorder: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, see 362.85 or 616.85. We had memoirs all over the place! I was frustrated, and our users were confused and learning that libraries were simply complicated places. I didn’t want to just increase our signage, I wanted a paradigm shift.

We started Trimming Down Dewey in our School Library
Step 1. We weeded the collection heavily and comprehensively. Our collection was 14,364 for 700 high school students. We weeded 2,621 volumes or nearly 20% of our print collection. We weeded anything that was out of date, inaccurate, worn, or had not been checked out in 10 years. We displayed the weeded books at a faculty meeting and asked teachers to take anything that looked valuable or interesting. The rest of them were picked up by Got Books, a company that sorts, cleans, and sells books back to consumers at incredibly inexpensive prices at the Used Books Superstore. The books never end up in landfills.

Step 2. The second thing we did was to map out our vision of the new user-centered non-fiction collection. We decided to break our collection into Popular Student Subject areas. Because of the way our shelving is set up and our limit on mobile shelving we were limited to 23 Subject areas. This is what I came up with:

Popular Subjects are now on display on mobile shelves and display areas throughout the library:

Music
Sports
Oddities
Cookbooks
DIY
Shakespeare
Poetry
College/Career
Audiobooks
Manga
Graphic Novels
Children’s Books (English, French, and Spanish)
Biography/Memoir
Atlases
Dictionaries

History (divided into subcategories, gathered on one wall)
Geography
Countries (alphabetical)
Ancient Times
European (Middle Ages, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, French Revolution, etc.)
World Wars I & II
Wars (Revolutionary, Civil, Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, etc.)
American (Decades)
New Hampshire

Everything that did not fit into one our subjects were left in Dewey order on the nonfiction shelves.

Step 3. After weeding we went through the collection again and pulled titles that would be better suited in one of our new subject displays. For instance, we pulled “Women in the Renaissance” and moved it to History / European / Renaissance. We also pulled any memoirs, decade specific books, and oddities.

Oddities is our most popular section of nonfiction books. We only include titles that are heavy with graphics, non-academic, and fun-to-read. We mostly focus this area on teenage boys who “don’t like to read.” We did include titles like the Guinness World Records, Paranormal Caught on Film, The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions, and The Zombie Survival Guide. We did not include titles like Paranormal Phenomena: Opposing Viewpoints as it is too academic (books about oddities aren’t necessarily odd).

After we got all of the books on the shelves in their proper order we decided to leave them for a month to see how it was working. We wanted to see if the subject areas we thought would be popular with our users actually were popular. We wanted to see if we should rearrange subgroups within the collections. Did it make sense to put “Martial Arts” on the Sports display or keep it in the traditional Dewey collection?

Step 4. We created color-coded signage for all of the subject areas and changed our shelf markers from Dewey ranges to subject headings. We decided to start off by adding a Prefix to the existing Dewey Number on the spine label and in the OPAC record. “Sports,” “Music,” and “Oddities” were easy. We decided to change the History numbers into History / American / 1920s.

Step 5. Our plans for the future are to compare check-out statistics, monitor in-library usage, watch for browsing and serendipitous learning. We will survey our faculty and students to see what they think of the changes. We may pull additional collections. For instance I’m considering a “Health” display to be organized by disease.

Stay tuned!