Re: [LM_NET] Dewey- or not

[Darlene Yasick <lib027yas@SBCGLOBAL.NET>]

I think that we have to remember the difference between Border and Barnes and Noble 
and our libraries. They want to sell books so it is great if you have to wander 
around to find a particular title, you might just pick up another book or two-- or 
three or four as I tend to do- sometimes forgetting what I was looking for in the 
first place! 
   
   We are in a learning environment. We are trying to enable our users to find the 
materials they are looking for without getting frustrated. Anyone who works in a 
high school will agree that for many of our students, frustration creeps in the 
minute what they are looking for doesn't fall off the shelf at their feet. ("I 
can't find anything on X" "Where did you look?"  Pointing in the general direction 
where X is shelved, "over there but there isn't anything there" You then walk off 
to the exact spot and pull four books on X right where they should be and right 
where they "looked")  With Dewey there is a place to look. I don't care if they 
know what is shelved in 347 but I care that they know where the books on government 
are generally located and that they can find 347. I want to be able to find the 
books also and to know where to put them back. Dewey does this quite well. If we 
teach them to search OPAC they can go to the proper shelf even if a particular 
topic like drugs
 is in two different places. 
   
  I know that many of us do add our own subject headings, after all the whole idea 
is to make the information accessible to our customers. We use cars instead of 
automobiles, AIDS instead of auto- immune deficiency syndrome and depending on our 
location soccer instead of football or vice versa. Most of the time the CIP makes 
sense and I follow it but occasionally I come across a book that I'm sure kids 
won't look for the assigned Dewey area. My wise mentor always told me , put it 
where the patrons will look for it and find it. 
   
  I don't want to make extra work for mysefl or patrons trying to figure out where 
I might have decided to put a book. I have trouble enough trying to remember where 
I filed the great idea that I found for a promotion- under contests, public 
relations, programs, misc-- you get the idea.
   
  I thought the pictures of the Arizona library were beautiful. The mention was 
made that it was to look nd feel more like B&N etc. What I saw was a lot of things 
that would cost a lot of money to do-- special displays etc. Most of us don't have 
that kind of space or money but we can ( and do) provide that atmosphere for our 
patrons--pleasant, welcoming with lots of vibrant displays and I think that is much 
better than rearranging the books in a manner that will differ from every other 
library they are likely to use.  It's not Dewy or don't we, it's how we make our 
space welcoming for our users. 
   
  A while back we discuss, genre shelving and I know that kids who read fantasy 
would like them all together so I thought about doing that. When my next order came 
in, I started trying to decide which books would go where and gave up after a few 
minutes because I just couldn't pigeon hole some of the books. Does the mystery set 
in 1940 go in historical fiction or mystery, does the book about a teen age 
forensic investigator go in mysteries or horror ( really gross descriptions), where 
does To Kill a Mockingbird go or Speak for that matter-- is there a teen age angst 
genre? So I gave it up . I do have genre stickers on the back of books to help but 
sometimes kids just find something different as they browse the shelves that they 
would never read if I separated the books. And speaking of that and our Dewey 
discussion, if I like an author who writes in many different genres like Meg Cabot 
and James Patterson, I can find all of his/her books in the same spot not in many
 different places depending on the topic of the book. 
   
  So I still guess there is a reason why Dewey works so well for most of us and 
that it is flexible to meet my needs.


Darlene Yasick
Media Specialist
Hopkins (MI) High School
lib027yas@global.net

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