We often have teachers who require their students to read a book within a certain genre (generally classics or historical fiction). With the genre categories, it is so easy to just point these students to that section, rather than having to search through the entire fiction collection to find a book that will fit the requirements and interest the student.

At this point, we are still struggling with how to catalog these books in the computer, though. We put genre stickers on the spines, and shelve them based on the sticker, but there is no way to tell in the catalog which genre they are. This can get pretty confusing for the students who aren’t familiar with the categories, and even for us if we forget which genre we put a particular book in, so that is something we are trying to figure out how to correct.

Our non-fiction collection is sorted in the traditional manner, except that we have a separate section for Memoirs because they have become very popular in our library. Most of our non-fiction graphic titles fall into the Memoirs category.

We have signs at the end of each bookcase that tell what genres or non-fiction categories are found on that bookcase. These signs have a large graphic, the name of the section, and the call numbers if it is non-fiction. We also have these same signs posted on the shelves themselves to show the beginning of each new section. In the non-fiction shelves, the signs at the end of the bookcases are more general , while the ones on the shelves are more specific. i.e. at the end of the shelf there would be a sign for “The Arts”, and on the shelves, we would have signs for “drawing”, “painting”, “music”, “theatre”, etc.