Ditched Dewey? I Have an Oddly Specific Question for You
We are in the process of generifying our K-3 school library. We’re beginning with nonfiction. If you’re going to ditch Dewey, start with Dewey, am I right? We’re working with the Follett categories (not a plug, just what we’re doing).
Now to the point of this post. If you’ve ditched Dewey, I have a very specific question for you: did you arrange the new categories into alphabetical order on the shelf (All About Me books next to Animal books next to Around the World books next to Arts books, etc.)? Or did you mostly keep things where they were with Dewey (so for example, Dinosaur books stay where they are, they don’t get moved to put them all between the Cooking & Food and DIY sections)?
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To alphabetize the categories or not to alphabetize the categories, that is my oddly specific question for you.
Comment if you have any hot tips!
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About Travis Jonker
Travis Jonker is an elementary school librarian in Michigan. He writes reviews (and the occasional article or two) for School Library Journal and is a member of the 2014 Caldecott committee. You can email Travis at scopenotes@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter: @100scopenotes.
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I’m keeping it Dewey-like with categories together for 2 reasons:
1-As I do sections one at a time I don’t have to move everything.
2-Having pets together and then within that dogs, cats, fish, etc. makes sense for us.
I am moving some things right away like putting wild animals and domesticated animals next to each other. Once it’s all done I may rearrange again. I want to see what seems to work best for my kiddos.
This makes sense – thank you for sharing, Barb! Very helpful to hear what other folks are doing.
I didn’t ditch Dewey but Isimplified things so most books are labeled with whole numbers. I grouped books to align with our curriculum. Water had multiple numbers – properties of water, water cycle, water pollution, water as a resource – and now it has only two that correspond to classroom learning: water and pollution. I kept things close to their original numbers, except for the solar system, which is now in the 600s and follows transportation, locating space and space travel near each other. I didn’t want to completely abandon Dewey because students may move from my school and I want them equipped to navigate another library.
I ditched Dewey in nonfiction about 6 years ago. I had three main sections to distinguish the groupings and I tried to make them into a flow.
“Cove 1” is mostly the special topics and stories-examples: Minecraft, All the tales (fairy, folk etc), humor, and all the awards, etc.
“Cove 2” is mostly all science topics- astronomy, prehistoric, animals, machines
“Cove 3” is mostly social studies-community, ourselves, military, world, USA and sports, etc.
It was a very long process and I made artwork to label each grouping because I didn’t love the stickers that were out there to help kids navigate and to also visually make sure books were shelved in the correct areas. Also changed the spine labels to be specific for a lot of the nonfiction instead of author three letters (example: ASTRONOMY MOON) and call number would be: NF-SCIENCE-ASTRONOMY MOON) I also weeded a lot so that the best, most high quality books would be available and not crowded with a ton of choices.
If you want to know more let me know! It’s taken me this long to finish and there have been revisions along the way as I’ve lived it with the kids!
Good luck!!
Jamie
We did within each section so for example we have NF ANIMALS then NF ANIMALS BIRDS then NF ANIMALS DINO and so on. Then the greater sections are alpha too. So our NF SCIENCE sections are at the end of the shelves!
I don’t alphabetize the categories. Instead I group them into “neighborhoods” of similar broad topics to support browsing & discoverability driven by common interests & to support curriculum! For example, curricularly for us history topics & current events topics are studied together bcuz of our social studies courses so it makes sense for us to shelve history categories near our “social issues” categories to help establish efficient & effective browsing & discoverability for our students even though alphabetically they wouldn’t be near each other. I suppose it can also depend on how many categories you have and how large the collection is, as at a certain size it probably becomes necessary to consider doing it in ABC order just to be able to quickly find the category you’re looking for.
I created topics based on what our students usually ask for, then clustered together topics that tend to be read by the same readers. So pets are next to animals. Transport is next to sport. I also arranged it so the topics most popular with the youngest kids are on the lower shelves. The older kid favourites are on the upper shelves.
It’s working well. The kids quickly learnt where their favourite topics are.
When we ditched Dewey I did not alphabetize. I used the physical layout of our space to determine which category went where. Our nonfiction section contained two corners where students looking at different bookshelves would frequently bump into one another. The spiders, sharks, and snakes were all located in one corner! It was a hot mess during checkout. I shifted the entire animals, insects, etc. group to the middle of a wall so it was easier for a lot of students to browse at the same time. Similar tweaks were made in other areas.
I’ve tried it two ways – the first time I alphabetized categories, and the second time I created over-arching categories like “Self,” “Animals,” and “Things to Do” to group subcategories (like “Dinosaurs” or “Land Animals”) together. The latter is definitely more browser-friendly!
Both times I kept the Dewey numbers to organize within the subcategories.
Hope you’ll share whatever you decide to do on this blog!