Today I am sharing a terrific blog that I recently discovered. The Mighty Little Librarian shares library lessons on various topics as well as book suggestions and reflections. Tiffany Whitehead, aka The Mighty Little Librarian, is the school librarian at Central Middle School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her dedication to the field has earned her the title 2014 Library Journal Movers and Shakers.
New and Noteworthy: Nontraditional Shelving
I was surprised to learn of a movement away from traditional shelving of library books. In her blog post, "Ditching Dewey," Tiffany explains her reasoning for adopting a new approach for shelving books. Beginning with fiction, she arranged the books into genres...what a brilliant idea! Terrifying to someone who enjoys order and typically does things by the book, but brilliant from a student standpoint. She reports that her students love the new arrangement and feels that it, "opens them up to new authors in a way that traditional fiction shelving does not." With no regrets at this point, she moved on the reorganize nonfiction titles by book industry categories. This is definitely something to consider in the future as my students typically want to know where to find the _(insert any topic here)_ books. In order to put this idea into practice, I would likely start with fiction titles as well. Because the younger students do not yet understand the concept of alphabetical order and often have trouble finding the types of books they want without assistance, I am very interested in categorizing the "everybody" or "easy" section...at least for certain series and high interest topics. This idea of nontraditional shelving seems rather controversial. I am not sure how middle school and high school librarians in my district would feel about students not having training in locating materials through our online catalog.
Hello Libby,
ReplyDeleteMighty Little Librarian has a great blog. A wonderful one to share here in your first post. Thank you so much for talking about her with our class.
The ditching Dewey or Genrefication of libraries was actually going on when I was in my middle school library in 2006. I genrefied my entire fiction section. Now doing the non fiction is really becoming popular or its coming back around. Every conference I go this is a popular topic. Thanks so much for sharing and nontraditional shelving is becoming very common. Something to think on when considering the needs of students. How do they find material? And will alternative shelving techniques make information and materials easier to find? Great thoughts.
Libby, I've come in contact with many librarian blogs and yet to come across Mighty Little Librarian's. Thank you for this connection! I haven't read about the "ditching Dewey" concept yet, so this is really peeking my interest and one that I believe is very necessary for today's students. Especially as we ensure everything we are doing is what's best for our students. We have to keep re-analyzing how they are finding material and what material they are looking for. Such good things to contemplate.
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