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Then, on top of that, all of our schools have only one librarian (and some are only staffed with one clerical position–no librarian). How does one librarian attack this on top of all else that they must do? Our elementary librarians must provide prep time for teachers and have very little “free” time (meaning time to do library chores instead of instruction).

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“We don’t have time for this.”
And nobody is requiring that you make changes to your classification scheme. As I noted in my writeup for the blog, one way in which much of the discussion overlaps is the desire for better signage. That doesn’t take new spine labels or changes in the catalog, but can help improve browsing in the collection.

“But Dewey is the standard.”
And it isn’t in other libraries. The key is that the information be organized in some logical, documented way. Can you please point to the AASL Standard that says students learn the DDC? In fact, there isn’t one. The standards that address this all say that students need to learn how and why information is organized…in a variety of ways.

“Common Core is the priority.”
And the Common Core places a high priority on information texts. One way to increase reading of information texts would be to make the section more accessible for browsing by grouping like topics instead of separating them according to DDC. For example, kids that check out books on tanks and fighter jets (600s) are probably more likely to want a book on the Army Rangers (300s) than a book on trains (600s), but that is in a totally different part of the library. Kids who read about football teams might be drawn in to reading a sports biography of a football player, but are much less likely to find it if it is buried in the biographies section. As we work to support Common Core, modifying how to classify and shelve informational texts could have a large impact on students’ adoption of informational texts.

“Dewey has been updated.”
And they did it by adding more and more places after the decimal point. Sure it covers new topics like the Department of Homeland Security (353.30973). You had best hope that Apple doesn’t start releasing iTelevisions, because books about internet connected TVs are 384.5502854678. The updates to Dewey, the seemingly never-ending quest to add more decimal places, make the classification system LESS useful in schools. We need an update to Dewey that re-works the 10s into modern categories.

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“And then there are the problems of district-wide implementation and staffing. In my district, there are 315 schools and Dewey is our district standard. What if two schools decide to do this? How will that affect the students who move from school to school? Will those two schools use the same system?

Then, on top of that, all of our schools have only one librarian (and some are only staffed with one clerical position). How does one librarian attack this on top of all else that they must do?” (AASL forum post March 1).

While her district is much larger than mine (315 schools to my 64), I agree that a district-wide implementation would be very hard to do, and would involve copious amounts of time. Most of my elementary librarians are flying solo, and all of them, even with ones with itinerants, only have clerical staff 6 hours a day (and that is generous since many of the assistants are pulled to act as substitutes or have lunch duty).

We have a union catalog that subscribes to the DDC, and our MARC records allow us to add as many subject heading we need to aid a student or teacher in finding a book. I think if I put all my librarians in the room and asked them to genre-fy the catalogs, there would be mutiny.

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In public libraries and school libraries over the years, librarians have broken or bent the rules and set up sections for fiction, picture books, easy readers, and biographies, etc., mostly organized alphabetically according to author. The call numbers for these sections begin with an identifying word, letter or group of letters: F, FIC, EASY, ER, JFIC, JF, JYR FIC, P, PIC: the array is dizzying and confusing, and belies the idea of a standard practice from library to library. For example, in our library, while we still had Dewey, we talked about “easy readers.” At one point the call number prefix was ER; we then shifted it to JFIC. Our picture books always had the prefix E. At the local public library down the road, the prefix E is used for “Easy” books, which are easy readers. The picture books have the prefix P or PIC. We always used the first three letters of the author’s last name; the public library uses only the first letter.
Biographies are another example: for many years we followed the practice of a separate biography section identified by B or JB and the last name of the biographee. Our sister elementary school library shelves their biographies in the Dewey sequence and uses 920 and 921 to identify the books as biographies. Our sister high school shelves biographies with subject.
If this seems confusing and complicated, that’s because it is. We have all taken these conventions and made them work for us in the best way possible for our circumstances and hopefully for our users.
I don’t think that it is shortsighted to take a look at this situation, and try to see what we as professionals can do to improve our systems of organization for our users. On the contrary, I feel certain that that is what I am supposed to do as a librarian.

When we decided to switch from Dewey and began to create our own system we did many of the things that Joanne suggests, on a small scale. We spent time doing online research to see what other libraries had done and what research was out there. We found Professor Linda Cooper’s research on children’s categorization, which was incredibly helpful to us as we searched for a way to create a child-friendly classification system. [Linda Cooper. "A Study of the Relationships Between Categories of Library Information as Typified by Young Children." In H. Bruce, R. Fidel, P. Ingwersen, and P. Vakkari (eds.) EMERGING FRAMEWORKS AND METHODS: PROCEEDINGS OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CONCEPTIONS OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE. pp. 17-32. New York: Libraries Unlimited, 2002.]

We began by reorganizing our fiction collection by the genre stickers already on the books. Students responded in a positive way immediately, even before we had had a chance to change the call numbers in the catalog.

We then created small sections, particularly with popular, non-curricular sections, and our circulation skyrocketed, climbing 80%, even 100% in certain sections over the same period the year before. Even with minimal signage and without proper call numbers, students were finding books easier, browsing more productively, and checking out books that hadn’t moved for years.

Part of our process was talking to students about the way that they thought about categories of information and giving them piles of books to organize, so that we could see what worked intuitively for them.

But ultimately, we had to change the system, implement the whole plan, in order to see if it worked. Our plan required relabeling with visual subject category stickers as well as specific call numbers, so that the collection was easily browsable as well as being easily searchable. Students and faculty still use our computer catalog to find books, our system is searchable and browsable. As practicing school librarians, perpetually overscheduled as we all are, we have not had the chance to do research since implementing our system. But our experiences every day with our students, faculty and parents tell us that even though some of the details may need work, and our system is by no means perfect, the new system is meeting our users’ needs in ways that our old Dewey-based system simply never did.

Yes, it was a lot of work but we believe that we owe it to our patrons to provide them with the best service possible.
Respectfully,
Sue Giffard and Tali Balas Kaplan

Tali Balas Kaplan
Librarian, PreK-2nd Grade
Ethical Culture Fieldston School
tbalas@ecfs.org
212.712.6293

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