What Color is Your Classification System
or
Cataloging for Children
and Library Accessibility
Johanna Halbeisen
January 11, 1993
Most of the literature on cataloging for children advocates
some kind of adaptation of the methods and tools used for an adult
collection. The adaptations are usually minor ones. Only a few
writers are identifying a need for broader changes and describing
ways some libraries have changed their children's collections.
The premise of this article is that any children's library
that serves preschool and elementary school-age children needs major
changes in the standard setup to be accessible to children without
adult assistance. The current system (Dewey and a card catalog)
depends not only on the user being able to understand alphabetization
and find and read entries in the card catalog, but also to locate
three-digit numbers and understand decimals. An elementary school
library using this system is basically inaccessible to at least half
the children it is meant to serve.
There are some widely used modifications in the use of Dewey
and other practices for adult libraries, some that are so widely
used, they need only a mention. Most children's collections make
some separation of levels of fiction, usually at least dividing
fiction into "Easy" or "Picture" books and juvenile fiction. Some
libraries further divide the fiction into "easy readers" and fiction
for different grade levels. Some have a "Young Adult" division.
Frances Corcoran mentions some of these adaptations1.
The use of the abridged Dewey is recommended for small public
libraries as well as for children's collections, the detail of the
unabridged being more appropriate for academic and larger public
libraries. Corcoran notes that Dewey puts biographical material in
the subject area of the biographee but that catalogers have the
option to put biographies under 920. I have never seen a collection
for adults or children where biographies were not together, either in
the 920's or as 'B' or 'BIO'.
Corcoran recommends the use of Dewey with children saying,
"One of the first reading readiness skills involves the ability to
categorize objects, and Dewey enhances this skill. Classification
teaches children the difference between fiction and nonfiction at an
early age." Several writers as well as this author disagree. For
children at the reading readiness stage, Dewey, its categories of
information and its call numbers, are all beyond their cognitive
abilities (2). What five or six year old (reading readiness ages)
can grasp the concepts of "social science", "philosophy" or
"technology", some of the main categories in Dewey? As for the
difference between fiction and nonfiction, my experience tallies with
Phyllis Kennemer's that the division is more confusing than helpful
to children, especially with areas such as folk and fairy tales,
poetry, plays and riddles in "nonfiction" (3). Also there is the
problem, Kennemer points out, in describing a vast amount of
information in terms of what it isn't. How can one explain the
difference to children? If one explains that nonfiction is true and
fiction is not true, a child is apt to ask, "Cinderella is in
nonfiction, does that mean it really happened?" Children in my
school have pointed out much that is true in fiction. I have
resorted to calling the categories "Information" and "Stories" which
still doesn't deal with the folk/fairy tale and literature
categories. I like Kennemer's proposal of making the three main
divisions be "Literature" (which is subdivided into poetry, plays,
and fiction), "Folklore" and "Information."
Leslie Edmonds' research used fourth, sixth and eighth
graders to assess how easily children can use on-line as well as card
catalogs (2). Fourth grade was the youngest chosen for the study
because it was assumed that by fourth grade, students should have
mastered alphabetization as well as use of the card catalog. The
study showed, however, that half of the fourth graders were unskilled
in alphabetization and in knowledge of general filing rules. Edmonds
also pointed out that the developmental stage of formalized thinking
needed for successful searches using the catalog begins to develop
around age eleven or twelve. Before that age, children are in the
concrete stage of reasoning. It is difficult for them at that stage
to generalize or to apply logic to problem solving, making use of a
card catalog for finding books slow and laborious at best. If we
take the evidence from this study, one could say that children at
least up to the age of nine (fourth grade) cannot readily find books
using the card catalog.
Making the printed aids to finding library materials (in this
case, the catalog) easier to use is the focus of most of the authors
concerned with increasing children's access to the library. Berman
(4), Edmonds, et al. and Chan (5) all advocate simplified and more
readable forms for catalog cards. Chan pointed out that after the
AACR revisions were made in 1974, Wilson Company, then a major source
of printed cards for school libraries and other children's
collections, continued to use the simplified format, because, once
again, what is useful for academic and research libraries does not
serve children's needs. Berman called for an addendum to AACR2 for
use in school, public and community college libraries that simplified
and clarified the form. The assumption of all of these authors is
that the users of the library can read well enough and have the other
skills needed to use the card catalog.
According to Joycelyn Brand, although the primary source for
subject headings for children's materials is Library of Congress
Subject Headings (LCSH), most school libraries use the Sears List of
Subject Headings (Sears) (6). The main advantage of Sears over LCSH
is economic and pragmatic, LCSH being four volumes where Sears is
only one and the cost of LCSH being well over three times that of
Sears. Brand makes no distinction between a subject heading list for
adults and ones for children. She doesn't mention anything about the
applicability of Sears headings for children's collections. Berman
advocates adding headings relevant to children's interests (7).
Florence DeHart writes about the importance of using subject headings
for picture books and fiction for older children (8). Ellen Kroger
also makes the case for good subject headings for children's fiction
for children, parents and teachers (9). All of these people assume
the patrons will be using the card catalog. None of them address the
fact that until children are reading with relative ease and have the
needed cognitive ability, they can't use the catalog (and therefore
the subject headings) to find books independently. Improving
children's card catalog and subject heading has limited value for
increasing children's access to the library. The focus needs to be
on the organization of the collection itself.
I will now look at three libraries, two public and
one elementary school, that made major changes in the way they
organized their collections in order to increase the children's
independent access to the books. The first two libraries (both
public) made changes in the way they organized their nonfiction, the
third (a school library) created a new classification system.
The children's librarian at the Shrewsbury Public Library in
Shrewsbury, Massachusetts observed that the youngest patrons (and
their parents) confined their browsing to the picture books and that
the appropriate nonfiction for that age group (shelved with the rest
of the children's nonfiction) had a low circulation rate10. To
address this problem, an easy nonfiction section was established in
the picture book area, with books for children seven years and
younger. The books were shelved in Dewey "clumps", ranges of call
numbers. The clumps were arranged in Dewey order, but books within
each clump were not. There was immediate evidence that the plan was
successful. The circulation of the easy nonfiction began to rival
that of the very popular picture book section. The staff also
observed that it seemed easier for children (and parents) to feel
more comfortable in the full Dewey arrangement of the nonfiction
books for older children.
In the Waltham Forest libraries in England, a new
categorization system was created and adopted11. A working party
studied the problem of children's access to books and concluded that
the categories for adult nonfiction were too detailed, not
child-oriented and took no account of the school curriculum. Twenty
categories were chosen using two criteria: where a child would be
most likely to look for a book on a given subject and the terminology
used by schools for project work. The new system was considered an
overwhelming success. Children found what they wanted more easily
and needed less help from library staff. Circulation had increased
and the popularity of some of the categories pointed to areas for
purchasing.
Janet Hoffman was the librarian for the Common School in
Amherst, Massachusetts from 1976 to 1985. She reports that before
she came, Dewey had never been fully implemented because of its
limitation for elementary use. Many of the Dewey categories were too
abstract. The call numbers meant little to many of the children,
even those who understood decimal fractions, and the card catalog was
rarely used. What the children lacked was some handle on the basic
organization of the library, some way to conceptualize the system so
that the library seemed more than just a mass of books (12). Hoffman
began to devise a system with some basic premises:
1) The system should reflect the integrated nature of
knowledge and discriminate between categories of books on the basis
of questions that are meaningful to the children in the context of
the school's approach to knowledge. The classification categories
should be ones a child would look for.
2) The system should support browsing (i.e. lead children to
books they are looking for independent of adult guidance).
3) Call numbers should contain concrete, immediately
comprehensible information about a book.
4) The system should have levels of complexity so that it can
be used by children at varying developmental and reading levels.
5) Grasping the ideas of classification and cross reference
and acquiring experience in the use of any system are more valuable
than mere exposure to any particular system (Teacher's Guide)13.
A detailed description of the system and how it works is
beyond the scope of this article, but an overview may serve to
illustrate how the system meets the above criteria. The system
divides the collection into seven main categories, identifiable by
color: fiction (black), biography (yellow), countries and cultures
(orange), myth/folk/fairy (blue), language (red), arts (purple), and
science (green). Picture books and beginning readers are treated
differently. Picture books have their own early-childhood-oriented
subject categories, indicated by a patterned tape on the spine below
the call number. On both picture books and beginning readers, a
narrow colored tape above the call number indicates in which of the
seven colored categories the book would be found. Fictional
treatment of any book within another category has a strip of black
tape at the top of the call number. In fiction, books related to
other categories have that color stripe (for example, an orange
stripe for historical fiction).
Each major category is subdivided into categories indicated
by a number. A student needs only a color and a one-digit number to
find books in a general area, for example, Orange 7 for Indians of
the Americas, or Purple 5 for books about making things. Further
divisions are indicated by the a three letter code (Purple/5/BAS for
basket-making). In addition, the Countries and Cultures section is
structured in parallel with the Myth, Folk and Fairy section, so that
books on the geography, culture and history of Africa are in Orange 4
and African myth, folk and fairy tales are in Blue 4. This supports
the curriculum of the school where all aspects of a culture are
studied together and it demonstrates the idea of cross-referencing
(12).
In all three of these examples, traditional cataloging and
shelving were abandoned because they were not comprehensible or
helpful to the people intended to use the the collections. The
categories used for the adult collections were not found useful in
either the Common School or Waltham Forest. The usual use of Dewey
for children's collections didn't work in the Shrewsbury Library, the
Common School or at Waltham Forest. Although library literature is
sparse when it comes to information about alternate systems, there is
some evidence to say that the three examples given here are not
isolated. Janet Hoffman gave a workshop about the system she created
for the Common School at a conference for independent schools of
Massachusetts. School librarians participating in the workshop told
her about the modifications they had made in using Dewey in their
libraries. She concluded that making major modification is far more
common than is evident in the literature (interview with Janet
Hoffman, March 9, 1992).
The objections to the Common School system are generally
along the lines of "What will the students do when they get to a
library with Dewey. such as the junior or senior high school?" I
asked the current Common School librarian, Linda Donnelly, about the
question. She said that older students (late elementary) frequently
use the town library and both from her report and that of the
librarian in the children's room of the town library, the children
seem to find it easy to learn a new classification system when they
understand the idea of classification systems in general and have a
working familiarity with one which makes sense to them (interview
with Linda Donnelly, March 16, 1992).
From a librarian's point of view, the major obstacle to using
a similar system to the Common School's in another library is time
and money. Janet Hoffman spent the better part of two summers
volunteering her time to recatalog the 3,000 books in the Common
School library; in addition a grant provided clerical workers and
teacher consulting time to process the books. Hoffman says that if
she had had any idea of the size of the job she was tackling, she
might never have started it (interview with Janet Hoffman, March 9,
1992).
While such a customized system means all cataloging must be
done in-house, Linda Donnelly, the current librarian, says one
advantage to doing all her own cataloging is that she is very
familiar with the collection. Writers on the Annotated Card Program
(AC) and CIP make it clear, however, that librarians have come to
rely on the central cataloging and annotations as an absolutely
necessary time-saver (14,15). The worse the finances of libraries
and schools get, the less time and money there will be to make
changes that necessitate doing cataloging in-house. It would seem
that the main argument for keeping the current system is that there
just aren't the time and resources to change it. Sondra Radosh,
children's librarian at the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts
looked at the Common School system for picture books and seriously
considered adapting the picture book subject categories for the Jones
Library picture book collection, but abandoned the idea because she
couldn't figure out where the staff time would come from for the
reorganization (interview with Janet Hoffman, March 9, 1992).
Another major impediment is finding the time, energy and
money to think through and create a system for one's particular
situation. The Common School system was created specifically to meet
the needs both of children and of the school's curriculum, and while
Hoffman was the main creator of the system, she worked closely with
the teachers and others with expertise to ensure the system would
serve curriculum needs as well as children's independent use needs.
Hoffman not only volunteered her own time, but also grant money
enabled all the head teachers to spend one day creating the picture
book subject categories (interview with Janet Hoffman, March 9,
1992). Few schools have enough teachers who would be interested and
willing to tackle such a time-consuming project, even if they and the
library staff could be paid to do it.
If there is any hope for a more child-friendly system to be
adopted, it will probably have to be implemented regionally or
nationally with the kind of cataloging support that AC and CIP now
provide to librarians. A basic system will have to be devised that
can be easily adapted for individual curriculum and community needs.
It appears that the Waltham Forest system may have such institutional
support as Tyerman reports that area libraries are expected
eventually to adopt the system and some book processing for the new
system is available at a central office11. Some effort would be
needed to gauge and counter the strong beliefs in the wisdom and
necessity of using the Dewey system with young children. A more
thorough study of the ways in which individual libraries have made
adaptations would probably show a pattern of what the new system
could look like.
To create and set up such a system would take much work, but
would be well worth the effort. An educational system that purports
to teach children the value of reading is missing a major
opportunity. We bemoan many children's lack of interest in reading,
but we routinely place huge obstacles in their paths to finding the
books they want. I believe that having a system with cataloging
support that is truly accessible to young children, one in which
children can find what they want on their own as they are learning to
read, will help many more children become life-long book lovers and
regular library users.
Bibliography
1. Corcoran, Frances. "Dewey Considerations for Children's
Collections in School and Public
Libraries" Cataloging Correctly for Kids, An Introduction to the
Tools Sharon Zuiderveld, ed., Chicago: American, 1991. Library
Association.
2. Edmonds, Leslie, Paula Moore, and Kathleen Mehaffey Balcom. 1990.
"The Effectiveness of an
Online Catalog (simplifying the catalog for younger children)"
School Library Journal 36 (Oct): 28-32
3. Kennemer, Phyllis. 1991. "Banish Nonfiction" School Library
Journal 37 (Nov):63
4. Berman, Sanford. "Dewey" The Joy of Cataloging Phoenix,
Arizona: Oryx Press,
pp. 169-188, 1981.
5. Chan, Lois Mai. "Further Comments on the Cataloging of
Children's Materials." Unabashed
Librarian 14 (Winter): 14-15, 1975.
6. Brand, Joycelyn Fobes. "Sears List of Subject Headings"
Cataloging Correctly for Kids,
An Introduction to the Tools Sharon Zuiderveld, ed., Chicago:
American Library Association, 1991.
7. Berman, Sanford. "Juvenalia." The Joy of Cataloging Phoenix,
Arizona: Oryx Press, pp.
159-168, 1981.
8. DeHart, Florence and Ellen Searles. 1985. "Developmental Values
as Catalog Access Points for
Children's Fiction." Technicalities 5 (Jan): 13-1
DeHart, Florence and Marylouise Meder. 1985. "Piaget, Picture
Storybooks, and Subject
Access: The Benefits of Better and More Accurate Subject Cataloging
for Children's Picture Storybooks." Technicalities 5 (March): 3-5
9. Kroger, Ellen. 1984. "Subject Headings for Children's Fiction."
Technical Services
Quarterly 2, no 1/2:13-18
10. Shartin, Jackie. 1992. "Easy Nonfiction at the Shrewsbury
Public Library" draft of paper
in progress.
11. Tyerman, Karen. 1989. "Alternative Arrangements: children's
non-fiction categorisation in
Waltham Forest" Library Association Record 91: 393-4
12. Hoffman, Janet. 1979 "The Common School Library" Appendix C of
the "Report from the Educational Policies Committee to the Common
School Board of Trustees on the Position of Teacher-Librarian"
In-house publication, February 6, 1985
13. "Teacher's Guide to the Common School Library" In-house
publication, no date given.
14. Marton, Jane E. 1991. "The Annotated Card Program." Cataloging
Correctly for Kids, An Introduction to the Tools Sharon Zuiderveld,
ed., Chicago: American Library Association.
15. Vita, Susan. 1985. "Getting More CIP in the Center, A Look at
the Value of CIP for School
Library Media Centers" School Library Media Quarterly 13, no. 1: 41-44
--
Johanna Halbeisen, Library Media Teacher
Woodland Elementary School (K-4)
80 Powder Mill Rd, Southwick, MA 01077
johanna.newsong@rcn.com
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