Genrefication
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One primary school’s experience of shelving their fiction collection by genre
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Genrefication
- 1. GENREFICATION One primary school’s experience of shelving their fiction collection by genre
- 3. Genre Blogs • Mrs Readerpants - Genrefication • E-literate Librarian – Navigating the library: Teaching genre • Mighty Little Librarian – Ditching Dewey: Choosing genre categories • Bulldog Readers – It’s a genre-based library • National Library – Genres for young adult and young fiction • Create Readers – Shelving fiction by genre? Let’s give it a go… • National Library – Arranging library fiction by genre
- 4. Our Genres • Adventure • Animals • Fantasy • Historical Fiction • Horror • Humour • Mystery • Realistic Fiction • Science Fiction • Sports
- 5. Labels
- 6. Labels
- 7. My Labels
- 10. Genres Within A-Z Shelving
- 11. But What About Wide Reading…? • “A recent survey showed that the primary factor in choosing a book for 7- to 12-year-olds was a familiar character or series” – What do children’s book consumers want? Publishers’ Weekly Survey 2010 • “While formula fiction may not win awards for great literature, when a child hooks into a favourite series and reads them all, their reading mileage soars” – “Reading at home”, National Library’s Services to Schools website
- 12. But What About Wide Reading…? • Quotes from “classroom strategies teachers use to create readers”, National Library’s Services to Schools website: • “High achievement came as a result of greater reading mileage” • “Increased reading volume will compensate for lack of extension in individual texts and readers tastes do gradually develop and broaden” -Dr Warwick Elley
- 13. But What About Wide Reading…? • My view – reading mileage should come first, then wide reading. • Our focus should be on increasing the amount of books a child reads, then we can work on promoting a wider range of reading options • Shelving by genre makes it easier for students to increase their reading mileage because they can find books similar to ones they have enjoyed • Promoting different genres can help broaden students’ reading tastes
- 14. Twitter Talk
- 15. Student Survey
- 18. Books in Each Genre 1 Fantasy 2 Humour 3 Realistic Fiction 4 Science Fiction 5 Historical Fiction 6 Mystery 7 Horror 8 Animals 9 Adventure 10 Sports 56 84 244 90 78 223 86 133 98 24 Number of Books
- 19. Most Popular Genres 1 Humour 2 Fantasy 3 Horror 4 Realistic Fiction 5 Mystery 6 Animals 7 Science Fiction 8 Historical Fiction 9 Adventure 10 Sports 5 20 59 8 35 99 21 24 15 3 Number Issued
- 20. Most Popular Genres 1 Horror 2 Humour 3= Fantasy 3= Mystery 5 Animals 6 Realistic Fiction 7 Science Fiction 8 Sports 9= Adventure 9= Historical Fiction8 23 24 8 45 44 24 18 15 13 % Issued
- 21. MAKING THE FULL SWITCH
- 22. Sorted Alphabetically Into Genres
- 23. Visual To-Do List (Un-Labelled Books)
- 24. Books Shelved by Genre
- 25. Ready to Go
- 26. What’s Your Genre Quiz
- 27. Genre Quiz Sign
- 28. To Do List • Signs linking genre to non-fiction e.g. humour to joke books, and vice versa • Lists of genres for students moving on from Quick Picks to try, based on what series they are reading e.g. Go Girl can try Realistic Fiction, Zac Power can try Mystery • Bookmarks for different genres with recommended books on them • Tellagami explanations of what the genres are and what to look for e.g. war books are in Historical Fiction; looking for a SCARY book, check out Horror • Competition based on PlayBuzz quizzes
- 29. Competition
- 30. Why Shelve by Genre? • Makes it easier for students to quickly find books based on their previous likes. • Helps with book selection as students find smaller sections not so overwhelming. • Makes it easier for librarians and teachers to help students find books they like. • Helps students learn about genre. • Encourages teachers to try different genres for their read alouds. • Provides more data for collection development. • Good tie in for all kinds of book promotions.
- 31. Michelle Simms • www.goodkeenlibrarian.blogspot.co.nz • @MSimmsNZ • http://www.slideshare.net/spaceace40
Editor's Notes
- So first up I want to clear something up. Genrefication can refer to ditching Dewey. I didn’t go there. My feeling is that I can work to make Dewey more accessible to my students without ditching it. So I’m talking about rearranging our fiction section by genre. The idea floated around in my head for at least a year before I started to implement it. I had seen comments on Twitter and articles in blogs from people I respected, but they were all overseas. Then I joined SLANZA’s National Executive, as the representative for Waikato/BOP, and I met other reps who were amazing librarians, and had done shelving by genre in New Zealand. In particular Miriam Tuohy, who had implemented it at a primary school. After that shelving by genre moved to my list of things I might do one day, when I get the time.
- And then Jennifer LaGarde, who blogs as Library Girl, wrote an article for SLANZA’s Collected magazine called “Five more conversations about school libraries that I don’t want to have anymore”. Number one on the list was genre shelving. Jennifer admitted to being a big fan of genre shelving and said “it is our job to make using…resources as easy and productive as possible.” The article focused on Dewey, but as I said I was interested in genrefying fiction. Having heard a lot about the positives I did some research on why people would be opposed to genre shelving. There were some horror stories of people who chose to genre shelve without changing their catalogue. So to find a book you had to correctly guess which genre it had been put into, which isn’t always easy. I am certain that if you decide to shelve by genre you must change your catalogue so that it identifies which genre you have put a book into. Another negative around genrefication was having to choose just one genre for a book that might cover several. I thought that was valid, But these problems didn’t outweigh the benefits for me – the main one being that we can help students easily find more of the books they like to read. So on the last day of Term 4 last year I decided to give it a go, giving myself the holidays to prepare. I got permission from our DP and then I emailed Miriam and asked her for any tips she could give me.
- The first step was choosing what genres I wanted to use. I looked online and found a lot information aimed at secondary school level but not much for primary. Here are some of the blogs I looked at. I myself blogged about starting genre-fication at the end of January and Jeannie’s blog post was on 18 February so we connected from that and I feel like the universe was cosmically sending her to give me confidence that I was on the right track Actually the last one is Jeannie’s fantastic information, it wasn’t around when I was researching but I’ve put it in here in case you want to use this slide to research. I’ve put it all on Slideshare so you can refer back to it if you want. Miriam sent me a list of the genres she used. At first I thought genres like animals and sports were too small, and I worried that there were realistic animal stories and fantasy animal stories and should we combine them together. But in the end I pictured some of students who are passionate about sports or animals being able to easily find stories they loved so I did include those genres. Miriam had a classics genre which I chose not to use. Our teachers don’t focus on classic novels at all and the ones we have in our library aren’t particularly well used. I didn’t think there would be any benefit in putting them in one place, a lot of them have ended up within historical fiction. She also had a “family and relationships” genre which I didn’t use. Instead I went with “realistic fiction” because I felt that between that and fantasy you are never going to be without a genre for a book to go into.
- So here are my ten genres. The one I wish I had included was war, which I have to point out to students can be found in my historical fiction genre.
- The next step was to pick out some spine labels. Miriam had recommended using Book Protection Products and also said that they would print your own if you asked them to. I decided to create our own and I was pleased to find that it doesn’t cost any extra.
- I’m not an artist so I turned to Pixabay, which lets you download images and use them commercially.
- These are my labels. They cost me $47.50, and apart from underestimating how many humour we needed, I still have plenty of labels left. The only other cost, apart from my time, was for tape to tape over the labels. An unexpected benefit in doing it this way, with my own labels, is that I have copies of all the images to use for shelf labels, posters, competitions, quizzes, bookmarks. It’s really useful and I’d recommend it for that reason. It ties everything together really well.
- I created posters describing what the genres were (I had to refer back to some of those blogs I listed earlier to work out definitions).
- I also created different collections in Access-it, Jeannie has information on how to do that if you need it, although I didn’t do mine like you’re meant to. I had 1,252 fiction books to sort into genres. I already had a “Quick Picks” section for my junior chapter books and I left that alone and concentrated on senior fiction.
- My plan was to put labels on one genre every three weeks but keep the books within the A-Z shelving until we were ready to move them all at the end. I tied that in with my Ninja Readers book club. Every three weeks my book club students were reading a different genre and earning a sticker for that genre if they read three books. It started with Science Fiction and then we did Humour. Around this time I went to a SLANZA library event and the conversations I had with librarians were really interesting. Their main concern seemed to be about the impact on wide reading. They felt that shelving A-Z by author meant that students would come across books from lots of different genres instead of maybe focusing on just one. I’ve done a lot of thinking about genre shelving and wide reading and I actually think that A-Z shelving forces our students to read blurbs and scan a lot of books in order to find something they might like to read. Which can be a good thing, but if they haven’t got much time to browse and read blurbs, or lack patience, then we risk the chance that they won’t find something they want to read. The books they take home may not excite them and may give them a negative view about reading and books.
- I think genre shelving builds on the benefits of series fiction. Here’s what we know: The primary factor in choosing a book for 7-12 year olds was a familiar character or series. When a child hooks into a favourite series their reading mileage soars
- High achievement comes as a result of greater reading mileage Increased reading mileage compensates for lack of extension in individual texts and readers tastes do gradually develop and broaden. When students feel like exploring something new, but not too far out of their comfort zone (and the wide expanse of the entire fiction section can intimidate some students) they can look within the genre their series is in. For example, having all the horror books together means that students who are hooked on Goosebumps may also discover Coraline and Doll Bones and other books where the author’s last name doesn’t start with an S.
- I took to Twitter to ask those who’d already started genre shelving what they thought of the wide reading argument. Here’s what they had to say: We can do what Tamara Cox recommends and expose students to variety through book talks, readers advisory and displays. Jennifer LaGarde points out that it is interesting that the comments were coming from librarians and not from the kids. I thought about Jennifer’s comment and decided to poll our students to see what they thought about shelving by genre. It was a good time to do it because they could see how the science fiction and humour genre spine labels looked on the books and I had talked to them about what genre meant
- 98% thought it would make it easier for them to find books to read. I’m going to survey them again at the end of the year to see whether they still agree with that, but definitely they were in favour. I told them that if they wanted it I would do it, so the week after I did that survey I went in and shelved my science fiction and humour separately, with the remainder of the books shelved A-Z
- I made my own shelf labels using laminated Pixabay images and bluetack, we might go more upmarket in the future but they’re doing OK at the moment.
- When we later launched the separate horror section we decorated it up a bit, and I dressed up for the book club. By early April I had already discovered some important things about the project. I learned that choosing one genre for each book is really HARD. I also found that I LOVE the stats that I can get on each of the genres. I can find the most popular books within each genre, how many books I had in each genre and how many were issued at any one time. This is really helpful for purchasing decisions.
- Here are my latest statistics as at 6 June. Fantasy was the biggest section in Miriam Tuohy’s school as well. It is hard to find good sports fiction.
- The number issued does not quite relate to the number of books in each genre. Historical fiction and Science Fiction are less popular despite their higher numbers of books. Horror is very popular despite relatively few books (working on buying more horror books based on this information).
- Horror and Humour were pretty much tied for most popular genre based on % issued. The negatives at this time were that processing new books and putting them straight into their right genre, regardless of whether they had been “launched” or not with their own shelving, created a bit of confusion for my student librarians. We have some genres within the A-Z shelving and some with their own shelving. I learned that I am an impatient person and having a half-finished project going along at such a slow pace was driving me crazy. So, just before the end of Term 1 I decided I needed to do something more. I began taking boxes of books home to put genre stickers on. I chose the ones that had easily identifiable genres. Each morning I’d do bulk changes to the catalogue. Within a week I’d made a huge amount of progress, 738 books had genre labels on them.
- In the first week of the holidays I found some child labour and made a full switch from A-Z to genre shelving in less than a couple of hours.
- We started at A and pulled out all the books with genre labels. We lay them on the floor within their genres and kept them all in alphabetical order as we went.
- We put all the books without genre labels to one side of the shelving. This is my big visual to-do list and is down to only two shelves now.
- Then we added one genre at a time back to the shelves and left room for more books to be added later.
- Term 2 started and my student librarians had to get used to all the new labels and that took a few weeks but they seem to have settled in now. I had planned to run a genre competition but a couple of senior teachers were running their own challenges so I decided to bide my time.
- Instead I made the PlayBuzz quiz I showed you in both my earlier presentations so I won’t dwell on it,
- but I did make a QR code to make getting to it fun. As of this morning I have 239 books left to label. I am finding some of these very difficult to assign a genre to, that’s why they haven’t already been done I’m also finding that some of these can be weeded. The reason I’m not familiar with them is because they haven’t moved off the shelf in a number of years. In some cases I’m seeing whether putting them in a genre might increase their circulation, so I’m giving them a short reprieve to see how they go.
- On my rather large to-do list around genre is:
- I even have the poster ready for the competition.
- To sum up, this is why I think you should shelve by genre: My recommendation would be to go for it, don’t think too much about how long it will take, if you’re a patient person this could be done a bit at a time. And based on my experience it is well worth the effort.