Information Takes Over

LibraryCrunch: Spine Labels and De-Dewefication

If you have genre labels on fiction books, why not have subject labels on non-fiction books and then simply shelve your materials by subject area (and by author within each subject area)? Imagine having all the computer books in one place, the baby name books with parenting, and Plato and Aristotle and Nietzsche all in one area called philosophy. Too radical?

There is an argument that suggests we use two systems, or rather a symbiosis of the two systems.

In a public library, it would certainly be useful to have clearly defined zones, area, sections (call them what you will), that allow users browsing to get to a relevent section quickly.

But what about the savy user (and we have many, who we have spent time training, and cajoling) who are attuned to the idea that they can look up an item on the catalogue and find out not only where to find it on the shelf (using a simple number matching process – in our case dewey), but which library it’s in and whether it is on loan.

Perhaps we should be looking at this from another angle. In Hereford Library We have computing books in three places, depending on whether the book deals with software creation and the internet (the 00′s), hardware (in the electronics – 620′s) or office software (in the 658′s), and even that turns up in the 00′s.

What we certainly ought to be doing is looking at our collection, whether with a view to doing as Michael suggests, and putting all the computing books together, or with a view to add signage to areas that may be missed, that is going to be a matter of preference.
In a Public library, where nuances of meaning don’t need to be expressed in the dewey classification, less granularity is acceptable. In an academic library, those nuances would need to be expressed, and frankly in the academic library I have been using most recently browsing is not an entirley satisfactory experience, as many books are on loan to others doing the same coursework, or out of date (unless you are really keen on tracing the history of collection management policies over the last 80 years), so you really need to search the catalogue effectively.

Now if the catalogue was to show me “other books taken out be people who borrowed this in the last two months” then I could browse…

But browsing is about looking at one set of shelves for a subject, and seeing whats available. If you are seeing whats available, then you would be starting the process by looking at signs, and if those signs showed a cross reference to shelves on the other side of the library that also had similar subject matter, then I would be happy to wander over there.

So what is my point? Good signage that highlights the different nuances of a subject could be as useful as dewey codes that identify individual books. Bold signage for main sections can act as a starting point, with “see also Office software at 658.??” acting as further direction.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 11:33 and is filed under Library. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.