It is all about access and what works best for your patrons. No two
libraries, public or otherwise, use Dewey exactly the same way and kids
who go on to college are going to be using LC. It is more important to
teach catalog skills and how to read signage than to try to match the
public libraries.
I have a separate biography section because it works best for my
students. We use 92 because to aging eyes (or uncorrected young eyes)
Bio can look a lot like Fic. I don't have my paperbacks on spinners
like the public library because I found that it made it harder to find
books.
Dewey is very good system but it ain't perfect and tweaking it is
perfectly acceptable. If we really wanted to standardize we would have
all of our audio, video, foreign language, graphic novels, etc.
interfiled in one big Dewey section. We would have all of our fiction
in the 800s, separated by country of origin and ethnic group. That
might work in some libraries but it would be a disaster in mine.
----
Tony Doyle, Librarian
Livingston High School, Livingston, CA
tdoyle@muhsd.k12.ca.us
<Http://www.lhs.muhsd.k12.ca.us/library/index.htm>
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get
people to stop reading them."-- Ray Bradbury
"One of the standard problems with the universe is that it's large
enough that unlikely things happen pretty often."--Nigel Sharp, U.S.
National Science Foundation
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> Remember dear people that we are training users to move to other
> libraries once they leave school. Will they find the biographies with
> BIO in the area public libraries?
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