Lesson 13: Organizing and Maintaining the Collection

• In order to improve access to learning resources, how important are physical changes in your own school library?

My school library was renovated about 10 years ago. In this renovation a fiction section was added on, and new shelving was created for the fiction section and center of the non-fiction section. Furnishings were also replaced and a new office and checkout areas were built.

Any changes are really minor. For example, when asked recently, frequent comments from students were about three main areas: One was in regards to the lack of signs. They would like signs posted in the NonFic Section to show general topics instead of numbers. Another area to focus on is the easy readers which are crammed into spinning book holders and are not displayed nicely at all. Lastly, magazines are in slots with no organizational strategy either.

Little do the patrons know that there is more disorder in the audio book collection – and that would be because they don’t know we have an audio book collection! It is not in the data base and not displayed anywhere.

• If changes are necessary, how possible do you think these changes are? Will they require a large expenditure?

These changes are not expensive, but require time and energy.

Update:  

Joanne (from our class) discarded some turning bookracks which were put up for grabs by the DRC staff before they went into storage, I said YES, and when I showed them to our metalwork teacher, and explained the size of the book problem, he immediately had students cut out the extra dividers that are between the books. It took a few days, but now the racks have no dividers, and the front covers of the books face out.

Interestingly, and I’m not sure it was Joanne, but a magazine rack also came up for discarding. Sometimes I think people have no idea how much other librarians have purchased these items for. I inherited a dusty, but almost new, magazine rack, and have seen the magazines improve circulation tremendously.

Audio books: Labels were placed on all books with audio support. The front and back covers of each book with an audio companion book was copied and glued onto a colored paper, which was then laminated. Now they will be attached to a ring, and students can search the books by cover and information, and know which ones are audio much easier than before.