Ditching Dewey: One Month Check-In

Last year, I took a huge risk and decided to completely revamp our non-fiction section.  It was my first year as a librarian, but I went with my gut and weeded 500+ titles and ditched the Dewey Decimal System.  Working with teachers and students, I created my own organizational system that more closely resembled Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com browsing (read about the process and the categories here).  After overhauling our organization, I placed a huge book order through Amazon.  Side Note: When school-specific book dealers want to include modern, engaging non-fiction, please let me know.  While I wait, I’ll keep my allegiance with Amazon and process every title by hand! It’s worth it.

My library workers and I were proud of our work, and we felt our library was easier to navigate, while also offering better products for patrons.  I must admit, though, that when I came back at the start of the school year, I wondered:

How would these changes be received?

Would new students, who were well-adjusted to Dewey, be able to navigate?

Would these changes show positive impact with numerical data?

One month into our school year, I am happy to report positive outcomes to all of my worrisome questions!

How have these changes been received?

Students have excitedly welcomed the changes to non-fiction!  With one very quick explanation, students intuitively hit the stacks.  After a quick walk around our outer wall, students can easily get the lay of the land, and they now navigate with ease.  I worried that my categories wouldn’t make sense to patrons, but I am happy to hear students repeatedly say things like, “This makes so much more sense this way!”  I was excited to see Dad is Fat by Jim Gaffigan–a title that was missing during our entire overhaul and therefore not labeled for the new system–placed in Arts and Culture/Pop Culture.  This tells me that my library workers understand the system so intuitively that they can classify books on their own.

Have students who are used to Dewey been able to transition?

Students literally cheered when I told them Dewey was no more.  They confide that Dewey would make sense in one moment, and then feel fuzzy in the next.  One student said, “I kind of know Dewey.  He’s like that one cousin you’re familiar with, but you’re not really sure how he’s related to anyone.” It isn’t a bad system–it makes perfect sense if you use it for research.  But our students were wanting to browse modern titles, and Dewey wasn’t conducive for that.

Did these changes show positive impact in data?

Prior to making the changes, our data shows non-fiction as 17% of our overall circulation in the first month of school.  This year, after making the changes, we have seen that number bump to 28%!  As schools stress the importance of students reading non-fiction, this is an exciting improvement!  Our students want to read engaging non-fiction, it is my job to help them see that such a thing exists!

I am excited to see how these trends continue, but we still have room to grow.  I am always  looking for new techniques to better the system.  It is clear, though, that non-fiction changes are relevant enough for modern librarians to consider.  For our school, these changes have resulted in increased student engagement, a more positive atmosphere, and improved confidence with locating interesting non-fiction titles.

 

Please comment about how you best promote engaging non-fiction in your schools!

Documenting Our Dewey Ditch

Before

When we officially decided to ditch the Dewey Decimal System, devising a new method of organizing was essential.  We knew we had to find a way to make non-fiction appealing to the eye, efficient to navigate, and easy to implement.  After scouring the internet for examples of high schools who had overhauled their non-fiction sections, I realized we might be one of the first.  I want to document our process in hopes of helping any librarian looking for tools and methods for genrefying non-fiction.

Studying Barnes & Noble
We spent a lot of time studying how Barnes & Noble organizes its store because students and faculty voiced shopping for non-fiction there, while avoiding it in our school library.  We wrote down all of their genre categories and combined categories into larger headings that matched our library’s collection and patron interests.  We learned that Barnes & Noble stocks multiple sections with the same titles, improving customers’ chances of finding a title.  We do not have this ability for most titles, so we had to ensure that our major categories were broad enough for students to intuitively navigate.  Our major categories were as follows:

• Supernatural
• Philosophy
• Study Aids
• Religion
• Lifestyle & Relationships
• Psychology & Sociology
• Science & Technology
• Animals & Nature
• Arts & Culture
• Poetry & Plays
• Sports
• Criminology
• Business & Economics
• Politics & Social Issues
• Military
• History & Geography

Stacks on Stacks on Stacks
After creating our larger categories, we had to start reorganizing the books on the shelves.  To free up space on the shelves, though, we started by making giant piles of books all over the library’s floor.  We categorized each book into its corresponding, major genre.  Unlike Dewey, we did not put biographies and autobiographies into a separate section.  We felt students were more likely to know they wanted to read a sports biography or a memoir by someone suffering with depression than know the specific name of said person.  Therefore, embedding these personal stories within the various sections made biographies easier for students to locate while browsing.

Creating Sub-Categories

After all of our major categories were re-organized, we had to start making sub-categories.  We needed a way to narrow sections, making it easier to hone in on a specific title, while keeping them broad enough for multiple books to fall under the heading.  Our goal was to make sure there were at least 10-30 books in each section.  If the numbers seemed to climb, we knew we needed to sub-divide even further.  If the numbers were small, we knew we needed to combine sections.  Here is a link to our final list of categories.

Re-Labeling and Shelving
One of the reasons we wanted to reorganize our non-fiction was our hatred for shelving with decimals.  We wanted to create labels that made shelving easy at a glance, but also helped patrons browse.  In large font, we put the first letters of each major section, and then in smaller font underneath, we put the entire sub-category title.

 

When re-shelving, we do not further organize the titles or authors by alphabetizing.  Instead, we simply ensure all of the subcategories remain together on the shelves.  We have found that scanning 20 titles is just as fast, when looking for a specific title, as searching for a lengthy decimal point.  It also has been easier to ensure titles are in the right spot, because one can see an out-of-place sticker at a glance when every book in a section has a matching label.

About Face
Prior to starting this process, we weeded a large amount of titles to free up space on the shelves.  Students voiced that one of the reasons they love Barnes & Noble is the amount of covers they see.  We put multiple titles on stands at the start of each section, which act as a visual marker for what types of books are in each section.  

We won’t lie, the process of changing was exhausting and mentally numbing at times.  However, we have seen so many great payoffs from implementing it!  It is my hope that our experience can encourage any intrigued librarians to take the plunge.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me at adlugosh@bolivarschools.org.

To read about why we took the plunge, click here.

Confession: I am a Public School Librarian, and I Abandoned Dewey

This blog is littered with confessions, many of which may make you feel I am inadequate to speak intelligently about organizing and peddling non-fiction in a high school library.  However, I would say my inadequacies (and the fact that I have not always been a librarian) make me the perfect person to speak about the need for a non-fiction revamp, for my confessions have led to honest conversations with students, problem solving, and a complete non-fiction overhaul that meant a total ditching of the Dewey Decimal System.  

Confession #1: The Dewey Decimal System never really made sense to me.  
I am a big picture person, so Dewey’s system of sub-categorizing any topic amazed me.  Though I could marvel at it, I couldn’t navigate it very well.  Too many titles felt like they belonged in multiple spots, so I found myself aimlessly wandering the non-fiction section.  These long hunts would usually result in me searching on the computer, and then returning to the stacks for a specific decimal point.  

After voicing this to students, they echoed a common struggle.  They had received marvelous instruction on the system in prior grades and schools, but the many subcategories of topics proved too much to hold in long-term memory.  Many faculty and staff also voiced the same.  We were all confident in looking up a specific book in the online catalog and finding it on the shelves, but browsing for information we desired stumped us every time.  One student said, “We don’t like looking foolish, and walking back and forth in non-fiction is foolish… so we just don’t go back there.”  

Confession #2: I don’t use books for research.
I am a lover of knowledge, and I self-declare as a lifelong learner.  I love reading non-fiction and talking about what I learn.  However, I will always turn to electronic sources when completing formal research.  I like that it’s faster.  I like that it’s current.  I like that it quickly links me to other valuable information.  I like that I can print and annotate.  All of these likes are harder to muster within book resources.  

Confession #3: I skillfully avoided shelving non-fiction.
There is something physically painful about staring at endless decimal points and trying to find the exact spot within a numerical timeline for a book about teenage pregnancy.  Shelving non-fiction took significant time, and I would offload that task to my library workers with boldness.  And they hated me for it.  One worker voiced cringing when people would check out non-fiction titles.  Why?  Because that meant we would eventually have to re-shelve them.  

With our Dewey confusion, our passion for perusing, and our disdain for shelving, we started the conversation about how to cure these issues with a change.  We started asking questions:

1. Why do we like book stores more than libraries?
2. Why does the non-fiction section overwhelm our patrons (and us)?
3. How can one organize vast amounts of information in less specified, easy-to-locate ways?
4. What if we abandon Dewey and create our own organizational system?

So we did.  We studied Barnes and Noble with a critical eye.  We pulled all of the books off the shelves.  We felt overwhelmed, but purposeful.  We saw immediate benefits and received countless sighs of relief.  

We ditched Dewey.  And we lived to tell about it!  

Our documented process will be in a blog-post to come!

Check out my post about the need for more modern non-fiction titles here.

Revamping Nonfiction: A Plea for Modern School Libraries

I used to be a self-proclaimed reader who respectfully abstained from nonfiction.  In elementary school, the nonfiction section was my go-to beeline spot during our library time.  Why?  Because that is where I could find informational books about dogs, which always had cute pictures of puppies.  As a child, the world feels even larger, and learning about my favorite aspects of this grand existence proved thrilling.  However, the thrill of a great puppy book waned as I aged.

As I grew older, my own story began to unfold.  With middle school and high school came all sorts of new insecurities, questions, dreams, etc.  The only thing I seemed to connect with, in hopes of understanding myself and the scary aspects of this world, was fiction.  I needed the power found in a story of another human, even if that human wasn’t  real at all.  

I will be completely honest, it wasn’t until adulthood that I realized that nonfiction books people read outside of school look totally different than the titles that lined the shelves of my high school.  I hadn’t realized that nonfiction books contained the stories of real humans, with real lives, with real hurts, and real triumphs.  I hadn’t realized that learning about science and history could keep me up at night when it wasn’t written in the form of a textbook.

So if I, a prior English teacher and current librarian, didn’t want to read my high school’s nonfiction and remained naive to the wonders awaiting discovery in Barnes and Noble’s nonfiction sections, how can I expect students to fall in love with nonfiction shelves that are all too similar to my high school’s ten years ago?

Libraries were once filled with a plethora of informational texts used for precise research.  These are not books intended for picking up and reading cover to cover, just as you wouldn’t engage with your college textbook in such a fashion.  As students now turn to the internet for scholarly research, modern libraries must find ways to overhaul their nonfiction sections and ignite a passion for lifelong learning among their students.  

Our nonfiction shelves should now be filled with titles that…

• Push our students’ thinking about equality by developing empathy rather than informing students about race relations.
• Empower students to take risks rather than just inform them about the products that resulted from those who have.
• Inspire students with stories of overcoming rather than providing them with bulleted facts about celebrities.
• Coach students in conquering issues like depression, loss, and rejection rather than provide them with WebMD-style facts about mental illness.
• Provoke students to ask questions about the science behind their lives rather than inform them about scientific topics that must be weeded every year because they become outdated.
• Encourage students to reflect upon the interconnections of history rather than telling them about isolated historic events.
• Equip students to think critically about the movement of culture rather than listing the facts that define a generation.
  

  

  

  

The modern library must make moves toward providing titles that inspire young readers and young minds to be empathetic, problem-solving, active citizens in our modern society.  The modern library should strive to empower young minds to make sense of the mass amounts of information digested on a daily basis, rather than provide them with books filled with more facts.  

The modern library should be filled with students who are excited and drawn to the nonfiction shelves.

Talking as Fast as I Can by Lauren Graham

My friend Anna and I have ship-named ourselves A-Squared (A2 for short) because of our uncanny abilities to be thinking/doing/saying the same things at the same time.  We also have odd similarities and quirks and celebrity obsessions.  She is one of the few people I know who also beat the trend for twenty-somethings to be obsessed with Dolly Parton, and we both have the tendency to keep buying a lot of the same clothing item before we realize it (for her, it’s black dresses… for me, it’s denim shirts).  We also share another similar love: Gilmore Girls and all things Lauren Graham.  So when I got this text from Anna (who tends to know about things years before I do), I drove 40 minutes to the nearest Barnes and Noble to purchase it.  The employee there, a pleasant young dude who was perplexed that the computer said there were 50 copies in the store but were nowhere to be seen, helped me track down a copy straight from a shipment box.  I started reading it while I pumped enough gas to get home.  I laughed out loud multiple times, and I only got through the introduction.

Lauren Graham writes autobiographically in Talking as Fast as I Can to explore a variety of topics relating to her career and thoughts about life.  The book is organized almost like a collection of essays, and lovers of Gilmore Girls and Parenthood will be pleased to find commentary of those experiences embedded throughout.  Graham’s humor and personality shine through her writing, further convincing me we’d be the best of friends.  Her courage to be herself was refreshing, and her unique critique and appreciation of Hollywood norms were also refreshing in a fast-paced, Snap-driven, show-me-the-best-side-of-yourself world.

Superlative Size Up

Best Author Asides
Lauren (oh, look at me referring to by her by first name, as if we’re friends, without even thinking about it.  Also… do you see what I’m doing here?)  includes commentary to her commentary with hilarious asides!  I think it is in these moments that her humor and personality really come through in the writing.  It makes you, as the reader, feel like you’re sitting down for coffee and really hearing the thoughts as they come to her, laughing as she tries to remember what she was actually trying to tell you.  You don’t care, because the aside became better than the main point anyway.  

Most Endearing Alter-Ego
Some of my friends say I’m like a grandma.  Turns out, I’m not the only one.  Lauren Graham spends an entire chapter exploring Old Lady Jackson, her more rigid, concerned alter-ego.  Sure, Graham is a hip TV star many people look up to, but she’s also afraid of the “old tindernet” and is worried about your tattoo choices.  I’ll admit, for one whole paragraph, I imagined she was sitting on the couch right next to me, ready to swat me if I didn’t take her advice.

Go buy Lauren Graham’s book, Talking as Fast as I Can, asap–and not on the Kindle version (the cover’s too cool to not own it in the flesh, and Old Lady Jackson would just be disappointed for you reading her advice on a blasted screen when she took the time to write it by hand).

Read my review of The Serpent King for another great book recommendation!