WOW! Today Karen Harmon and I shifted the ENTIRE non-fiction section. That is about 20,000 books that we moved about 1 row over. We did that to make room for the ever growing graphic novel section. Yeah for graphic novels! It also gave us the opportunity for reorganizing some of the shelves. Some of them were split in strange places.
I also suggested that for shelves that held high interest topic, we add labels for easy perusing.
Karen liked the idea, so I got to play with the label maker. Some of the labels I made were Football, Cooking, Soccer, Hockey, and more.
I also made Dewey number labels for the shelves. For example I labeled them like 811.230- 811.999. 811 (poetry) is a BIG section, so it required some interesting labeling. ie 811 AAA-KZZ then 811 LAA-PZZ or something similar. I’ve seen these labels on the shelves for years, but it was good to be the one having to think it through. It brought a much better understanding of the minutia of how this is done with the convenience of having a mentor there to answer questions that rose.
It also helped me become more familiar with what kinds of books are in which Dewey section. At one point I saw a bunch of Ancient Rome, Babylonian, and Ancient Greece books (930s). Then on down the row (940s) I saw ancient Rome again. The book was actually called Ancient Roman Warfare. I thought since it was titled Ancient that it should be with all the other ancient cultures, but I think this was put in European History with the World war books because it was about warfare. Perhaps. It was good to think about such things.
All the while, I chatted with Karen. We talked of life. I also peppered her with questions about topics I had seen come up on some Facebook Librarian pages that I follow. One of the topics was the reference section. I heard that some librarians are completely eliminating the reference section of their library. Out is not huge. I asked Karen about it. Some teachers do use it with their classes. The almanac get used for that. Our World Books are from 2010. She said she will very likely weed those in the next few years and not replace them since we have database resources that fill that need.
It was a ton of hard, sweaty work, but I enjoyed it none the less because I learned so much and I had good company.
Book Wyrm Pages 