On Shelving Books 

Something I learned today, because our school no longer has a librarian - only a clerk, me, sitting in the librarian's chair: a reason why our school library is not like the Library of Congress.

For months I have looked at the wooden signs on the shelves, "Fantasy", "Fantasy Fiction", "Horror", "Graphic Novels", etc., and not known what kind of library this was. I noticed that most spines carried only "FIC" and three letters, not numbers, and wondered how anyone could shelve with so little. Today, shelving for the first time, I found the sports books at 796.33 grouped by sport rather than by author, and the grouping not kept. I was flabbergasted.

It turns out that our school library shelves fiction by genre. Dewey Decimal numbers are used only for nonfiction. Many school libraries do the same, and each librarian chooses the genres for that school, based on the library's inventory.

The label on a novel in my library says only "FIC/FUR" - that is what yours would say, if you had written one. It does not name the genre.

So I must work out the genre myself, starting from the copyright page if the information is there. Then I wander around the library to find the sign for it, e.g., "Realistic Fiction". Then I shelve the book alphabetically by the author's last name, and then by title.

If nothing else, I will add to the disorder by misplacing books, because when the copyright page does not give the genre, I have to guess.

Nonfiction may have the same problem. On the shelf I worked today, grouping by sport scatters an author across the section, and there is no rule for the order of the sports; the shelf can be kept only by eye.

Claude Fable 5.1 says that the library catalog would most likely record the genre of every book. But our checkout kiosk is set up by the school district, and I have not found the genre recorded in our kiosk's information.

So much for experiencing something like being an employee at the Library of Congress!