Breaking Up with Dewey

As a follow-up to “Putting Dewey on a Diet” I’ve made some additional adjustments in our library. Read on…

While my main library goal is “connecting users with information,” I need to keep in mind that it doesn’t mean overwhelming them with so much information they don’t know where to turn. Weeding helped this process, as I was no longer putting outdated and inaccurate information in the proximity of my users. When we weeded, we got rid of 25% of our nonfiction print collection. 1 in every 4 books was removed from our shelves. This change created an immediate improvement in the appearance of our bookshelves.

After weeding, we pulled out all of the sections of books that had been frustrating us at our high school. For instance, we pulled our PostSecret books out of the art collection and How to Build a Robot Army out of our literary essay collection.

How to Survive a Robot Uprising was in the literary essay section

PostSecret books were in the art section

We moved both titles to our most popular new section called “Curiosities & Oddities.”

Now, both titles are on the “Curiosities & Oddities” shelf

Our country books are shelved alphabetically by the name of the country.

We also moved all of our country books. We decided to put them in order alphabetically by country name and change the call numbers to “Countries.”

We are starting to notice that our checkout statistics are increasing (compared to the same time period last year). I will update soon with more areas of change and some statistics!