Shelf Shifters

If you'd like your media center to attract as much traffic as Borders or Barnes & Noble, try "genrefying" your fiction collection. That's what more than a dozen secondary school librarians in the Round Rock Independent School District in Austin, TX, decided to do last year.

It's not surprising that major bookstores are always crowded. They offer big comfy chairs, warm lighting, and all kinds of coffees and treats. We tried to create a similar environment in our library at Cedar Valley Middle School, and even started selling mocha and hot chocolate. But the most significant part of our marketing campaign was to carve out a fiction section.

I plucked all of the 5,000 fiction titles from our shelves, retagged them, and placed them on rearranged shelves to the right of our entrance. As a result, many female nonreaders have come to the library in search of books that have been turned into films. When one student realized that The Princess Diaries (HarperCollins, 2000) by Meg Cabot was relocated to a new fiction area called romance, she was suddenly interested in reading all of the other books in that category. Now, many students run into the library between classes just to see if any new books have been returned to their favorite sections. This is especially true of students who read suspense or "scary" books.

Genrefying your library is a fairly easy process. It took me about five to six months to create our new fiction section. I started by sorting books into 15 of the most popular genres, including fantasy, graphic novels, humor, and adventure, which tend to generate more enthusiasm than, say, historical fiction. Then I put stickers with appropriate images (a unicorn for fantasy and a heart for romance, for example) on the books and placed them in their new sections. The cost of materials—genre labels and label covers—is less than four cents per book and can be purchased from library suppliers such as Demco. Most of the work was done during the day, over the course of a semester, with the help of my full-time assistant, five student aides, and three parent volunteers.

Changing a book's information in the card catalog can be very time consuming, so I suggest tackling one genre at a time. When building my romance section, I looked for books by romance authors and searched my online catalog using words such as "boyfriends" and "girlfriends." I also asked my helpers to suggest books that might be suitable. I promoted our new fiction area by telling kids directly, placing signs in the library, and announcing it to each visiting class. I also e-mailed our language arts teachers each time we added a genre, asking them to tell their classes.

Reorganizing your collection is also a great opportunity to weed it. I tossed books that were in poor condition or that weren't circulating. Another added plus is that after seeing and handling almost every work of fiction, I can better recommend titles to students.

Regrouping my collection has been invaluable. Now there's a large contingent of "nonreaders" who stop by the library to find "their" kind of books. Students rushing between classes can quickly find their favorite genre or one that they need for an assignment. Annelle Covington, who just retired as the librarian at nearby Chisholm Trail Middle School, received a handwritten note from one of her students thanking her for dividing the books into genres. Half of the letter was misspelled, but there was great enthusiasm behind the boy's words, as he thanked her for making the books he liked "easier to find."

There are detractors who say this approach will only limit students to the books that interest them. That may be true, but is that so bad? To a nonreader, finding a book that's interesting only makes reading more appealing. I say that these reluctant or low-achieving students are gaining the confidence they need to explore other genres.