Has a kid ever asked you, “Where are the sports books?”
When I first took over my school library, I had never heard the term “genrefied school library,” and questions like that flummoxed me.
For one thing, I’d only just stepped into this role, and it still felt like someone else’s library. I had yet to place my first book order, and I definitely didn’t have a strong handle on the nuances of my fiction collection, which was neatly and traditionally alphabetized by authors’ last names. This organization system made it very easy to find a book by a specific author, but much harder to quickly access all the sports stories for easy browsing.
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I would stammer a lame reply like, “Uh, they’re kind of…sprinkled all over,” explain that the collection was organized alphabetically by the authors’ last names, and watch the kid’s eyes glaze over.
Not the reaction I was going for.
It didn’t take me long to realize a few things about my new population of teenage patrons.
Kids don’t care about the “right” way to organize books.
Dewey Decimal system? *shrugs*
Alphabetical order? *meh*
Traditional library strategies? *frowns*
They just care about finding ones they’re interested in.
Kids have opinions.
Most of them, now that they were in high school, had a pretty good idea about the types of books they liked–and definitely about which ones they didn’t.
Some of them had only a single genre they would even consider reading (sports and romance come to mind). Others were willing to entertain multiple possible genres–say, sci-fi or dystopian–but wanted absolutely nothing to do with books featuring athletes or love stories.
The hard-core readers were going to find books no matter what I did.
I could place the books with their spines facing in, arrange them by color, or stack them arbitrarily; the most motivated readers would find their books in spite of me.
Some of them were happy to read any book at all. Some of them, like homing pigeons, had an uncanny knack for pulling “their” books off the shelves. And some of them seemed to have the entire collection memorized, often returning to check out the same books over and over.
These were not the people who needed a genrefied school library.
Genrefication helps picky and/ or reluctant readers.
Now, all my sports fiction is shelved together. Same with romance, dystopian, fantasy, and suspense… so it’s easy to steer the murder mystery aficionados, the love story fans, and, yes, the sports kids to the area where they can easily browse for their chosen topics. And once they become familiar with it, they return to those same areas over and over.
The hard-core readers still have the entire library memorized. But now, a lot of the niche readers have their own genre sections memorized, too! I love seeing more kids confidently navigating the library–and finding the niche where they feel they belong.