Non-fiction Genrefication

It’s safe to say I felt comfortable hopping on the Genrefication train the second I got to middle school and did a very successful transition for my fiction section my first year there. Click here to read about it. But when it came to my nonfiction section, I was stumped. A lot of other librarians that have genrefied their entire collections talked about pairing your nonfiction with your fiction so for example if I have a Sports section in Fiction, I could pair it with my 796 collection, which sounds amazing and definitely easy for the kids to find what they’re looking for. However, in my library the set up is not conducive to this. I have an already very packed Fiction section where I have to weed every year to keep it from overflowing. My nonfiction section runs the length of the library, two shelves from the floor. The shelves are very short so most nonfiction titles are too tall to shelve with the spine facing out so I have to turn them. For this reason, as well as nonfiction just isn’t as popular as fiction, I had very low circulation numbers my entire four years so far. I’ve tried doing spotlights on certain sections, displays, book talks, etc. Nothing worked.

So I got creative. Again, Dewey is probably turning in his grave over this, but I honestly believe I have to do what’s in the best interest of my patrons and my library. Therefore, we started the nonfiction genrefication process in February by pulling all the books off the lower shelves across the library and weeding. After the weeding was done, then we started to put them in categories, just like I did for fiction. Only this time there would be way more categories than the genres I had picked for my fiction section. I was able to order white bins to put the books into on top of the previous nonfiction shelves and we were able to label them and put them in the bins. The next step I had planned for after Spring Break, only thanks to COVID-19 we never came back from Spring Break.

My plan in the fall is to color-code the books with colored dots that correlate with the color of the sign that’s on the bin. This makes it easy for my student library aides to shelve the books by matching the color dot with the color of the bin it’s supposed to go in. We had only had the books in bins for about a month, but I checked out more nonfiction titles in that one month than the entire four years I’ve been a librarian at that school. That makes this worth it to me. This section was underutilized, neglected and dated. One of my goals for this year when we return to face-to-face instruction is to continue to purchase new and relevant titles for the library to help bring up my collection age and finish labeling the books in the new nonfiction section. I then will need to change the Sublocation in Destiny so that students can easily find titles they’re looking for by searching in Destiny Discover and finding the matching bin for the book they want. Although, most students found what they wanted through browsing. It might not look the best or be the prettiest, but if kids are checking out these books and reading more informational texts and nonfiction titles, then I feel like I’m doing my job.