{"id":1037,"date":"2013-11-29T18:36:59","date_gmt":"2013-11-30T00:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mightylittlelibrarian.com\/?p=1037"},"modified":"2015-09-08T13:01:19","modified_gmt":"2015-09-08T18:01:19","slug":"ditching-dewey-choosing-genre-categories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mightylittlelibrarian.com\/?p=1037","title":{"rendered":"Ditching Dewey: Choosing Genre Categories"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite things to talk about in library land is the genrefication of our library. I frequently get questions about this from folks who have read my blog posts or have seen me present. I blogged about the process all along the way, from the\u00c2\u00a0tagging my fiction books<\/a>, to genre shelving fiction<\/a>, to ditching Dewey in nonfiction<\/a>. Those posts were basically my reflections and thoughts from when I made the move. For a while now, I’ve been wanting to write a more comprehensive blog post that I can share as a reference for people interested in genrefying their library. After our AASL presentation<\/a>, I realized that a series of blog posts would be the way to go. So this post will be the first of several that will detail the process I used to genrefy the fiction and nonfiction sections of our library.<\/p>\n

The first step in the process is to choose the genre categories that you will use. For fiction, I didn’t want to get too specific with my genres. My original categories for fiction were: realistic fiction, sports, romance, Sci-Fi\/fantasy, mystery\/suspense\/horror, and series. As I sorted through the books, I made some changes to these categories so it made more sense for our collection and our students. I decided that it would be better for the series to go with their genres and clearly label them as series within their corresponding sections. I also added several more sections. Our fiction genres now include: historical fiction, general\/realistic fiction, Sci-Fi\/fantasy, action\/adventure, mystery\/suspense, sports fiction, relationships\/romance, and inspirational fiction.<\/p>\n

\"FictionGenres\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After the success I found with our genrefied fiction, I wanted to follow suit with our nonfiction. Choosing these categories was a little harder for me. Thankfully, I had my friend Tamara Cox<\/a> to look to for advice. I took her nonfiction category choices and tweaked them to work with our collection. These are the categories we use for nonfiction in our library:<\/p>\n

\"NFtags\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Some of our larger sections are broken into subcategories as well. This is our section and subsection breakdown:<\/p>\n

Section List<\/a><\/p>\n