Smile!

Last week I took my 3 girls to our local public library for some new reading. My 4 year old happily deposited herself on the floor with a basket of paperback Berenstain Bear books. My 7 year old went off to find something new in the series section. And my 10 year old wanted Smile by Raina Telgemeier, so she walked over to the Graphic section. Two minutes later she came back to me and said she couldn't find the book. So, we walked over together looking for the letter "T" and scanning the shelves.
No luck.
We went over to the computer catalog to look up the book and found that its call number is "J GRAPHIC 617.46 T" in some branches or "GRAPHIC 617.465 T" in others. Alright, close enough, I thought, and we headed back over to the Graphic section to find the non-fiction.
No luck.
Having no choice at this point we walk over to the librarian's desk to ask for help. "Oh, yeah," she says, "that's actually in the non-fiction section."

WHAT?!? Who thought that putting a graphic memoir in Dentistry was a good idea? But more than that, who is actually going to be able to find that book? Not only because the cataloging is not intuitive but because the call number makes no sense in relation to where the book is actually shelved.

Over on LM_Net there has been a rousing discussion about the pros and cons of trying alternate classification systems. One of the arguments against alternatives, is that children can walk into any library and find a book in the same place. Well, that might be but it seems at NYPL it depends on the branch you're in. Let alone if you happen to be in Queens where it would be under "617.64 T" or in Brooklyn where you'd find it in "J FIC TELGEMEIER." Some might argue that this is an exception, but it's not. Maybe we've gotten so used to "tweaking" Dewey that we don't even realize how different it is from place to place.

Creating Our New System

We began working on creating a new classification system with a palpable sense of terror and excitement. We knew the task was huge. We had no idea if we were up to it. We began at the beginning. The process involved a great deal of thinking, talking and pushing at each other's arguments to try to find the flaws, book and online research, anecdotal research on our students, and experimenting with sections of our collection.

Although we had no idea yet of the details, we were clear about our objectives. Our new system had to include the following characteristics:

• It had to be child-friendly. By that we meant that it had to begin with the thought categories and language used by children of various ages.
• It had to encourage browsing. That meant that the order and the sections and sub-sections had to be clear not only to the librarians, but also to the students who were using the library.
• It had to be flexible. By this we meant that it had to be capable of being used or adapted for use by a range of ages (4 through 11); it had to be capable of growing as time went on, as the world changed and as our collection grew. In addition, we knew that the idea that we were going to devise a universal scheme with everything already included in it, as Dewey had done, was not at all what we had in mind. We would tailor our scheme for our collection and for our users, and do our best to leave options open for change in the future.

In order to ensure that we met these requirements, we came up with the following ideas that informed our subsequent work:

• We needed a strong central visual component, especially for the younger students, but also to help orient older students, so that it was clear with or without reading skills which section students were browsing in.
• Our use of code had to be minimal, if we used it at all, i.e. we had to use whole language in our call numbers and on our spine labels.
• Our order had to be simple and clear.

We settled on the following general plan:

• We would use primarily alphabetical order. While younger students struggle with this, it is a skill which is taught beginning with the alphabet in the earliest grades, so that the rudiments would be present even for the youngest students. It is a skill that is still used in classrooms, with print dictionary and encyclopedia use. Where alphabetical order was not possible or would be confusing, we would use a straight number order.
• Because alphabetical order of the main classes would result in an unhelpful overall order, we decided on a single piece of code: each main class or category would be given a letter of the alphabet. That letter would be the ordering device for the main categories. This would allow us to put related main categories together, regardless of their position in the alphabet.
• Within main categories we would use primarily alphabetical order for the sub-categories. This would give students a clear order when browsing, and allow for maximum flexibility and adaptability in terms of future changes and expansion. In a few cases this order was unhelpful, and in these cases we opted for a straight numerical order.
• Each category would have a visual symbol or image associated with it, which would appear on the spine label, as well as on posters and signage.
• We decided, and this turned out to be a crucial decision, that we would give up the idea of a system which classified books in as specific a way as possible. Instead, we opted for something we have called "categorization," based on some of the ideas in a system in the East Sussex Public Libraries in the UK in the 1980s: we would put books in helpful categories, and dispense with author cutters except where helpful (fiction and poetry). Overall, this meant that many times there would be more books with the same call number than with Dewey. Our job would be to keep those categories manageable and of a helpful size.

• Particularly in the lower grades library (PreK-2) we decided on another crucial principle: we would mix fiction and nonfiction in categories, identify whether they were fiction or nonfiction on the spine, but interfile them on the shelves. That would mean that a kindergartner looking for a book about dogs would find both fiction and nonfiction in the "Dogs" section, but would be able to see which books were fiction from the spine label.

So far so good. But what were the main classes to be, and how would we figure them out? Stay tuned for the next installment.

Why We Don't Dewey

When we four librarians gathered in the library office just over a year ago to watch the Darien Public Library's Powerpoint about their new system for their preschool section, it didn't take long for us to make the leap to deciding that we wanted to do something similar, but for PreK-5^th grade. For anyone watching, their reaction might have been surprise at our willingness, scratch that: enthusiasm, in dispensing with the Dewey Decimal Classification System with such rapidity. The truth is that we, like many librarians, had been dissatisfied with Dewey for many years.

What was it that we disliked so much? Even if we disliked it, surely a system which has been tried and tested, is almost universally used in school libraries, and is seen as an essential part of running a library in a professional way, would be preferable to anything that we could come up with. Not so, we were quick to argue.

Here’s why.

The purpose of the Dewey system is to pinpoint as closely as possible the subject or topic covered by the book. The number generated, combined with the “cutter,” (usually the first three letters of the author’s last name), provides an almost unique call number, which enables the person searching for a particular book to identify the book quickly, assuming that you first searched the catalog and found the call number, then were able to located that call number’s place in the sequence of books on the shelves and third, that the book was in the correct place in the sequence. These are pretty big assumptions, especially when the majority of your users are in the second grade or below.

PROBLEM 1: Division by Discipline. Dewey divides the universe of knowledge into ten main classes. This division is predominantly by discipline. You can see the division by discipline clearly in the 300s, the Social Sciences main class. For example, 306 is the number for Culture and Institutions. Under this one finds all kinds of institutions, including religious institutions, political institutions, family, sexual relationships, etc. When last did an 8-year-old show an interest in “institutions” as a topic? Maybe it doesn’t matter too much if you’re only interested in providing access through specific catalog searches, and all of your users are going to be looking for books with a call number in hand. The truth is that most of our users are browsing: looking along the shelves for interesting or useful books. That means that we want to put related books together as much as possible. This simply isn’t served by putting books about political institutions next to books about family structures on the one hand, but separating books about kids’ feelings about their families in one main class from the books about family structures in another.

Dewey simply doesn’t group books on related topics from a child’s point of view. For example, non-domestic animals and pets are separated on the shelves by the topics of: inventors; the human body and medicine; engineering; various kinds of transportation, including space travel; robots; and gardening and farming. As another example, sewing and knitting are in different main classes. I could go on and on.

PROBLEM 2: Bias. The Dewey system was invented by an American steeped in the Western intellectual and cultural assumptions of the 19^th century. Despite many changes and updates, the basic structure remains. For example, Christianity takes up no less than 70% of the 200s Religion main class, leaving Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism all with numbers on the far side of the decimal point.

PROBLEM 3: Numerical Code. For children, this may be the biggest barrier to access caused by Dewey.

First, the code is opaque and far too complex to teach in detail to students. We teach that the 700s are Arts and Recreation, including sports, and then we expect students to find baseball books at 796.357, or football books at 796.334.

Second, while some numbers are fairly short (3 or 4 digits), most are longer. A book on lions has a number that is 7 digits long (599.7442); a book of folk tales from Vietnam, if one has a substantial collection and subdivides by country, has a 9 digit number, almost a phone number and area code (398.209597).

Third, there’s the decimal aspect, which is there, it seems, simply because Melvil Dewey loved decimals. Students learn about decimals in math only in third or fourth grade, i.e. more than half of our students have not learned about decimals.

Fourth, to add insult to injury, in order to find a book on the shelf students must be able to put decimal numbers of up to 6 numbers to the right of the decimal point IN ORDER. Or, rather, be able to insert a decimal number on a slip of paper in their hand into the order on the shelves. Libraries are the only place in the universe that I’m aware of that require this particular skill. Enough said.

All in all, we had become convinced over the years that Dewey, rather than enabling our students to find what they needed, created barriers for them. It sometimes seemed that our students found what they wanted despite Dewey rather than because of it. We wanted to believe that it was possible to do better.

When we saw the inspiring example of the librarians in Darien creating a system with preschool children and their needs at its center, we began to believe for the first time that we could do something similar for our students.

Our New Library System

It's been a fascinating process watching students negotiating Metis, our new categorization system, and tracking how they have been using our collection. While some of the new categories, such as Animals, represent more or less the same books as the corresponding Dewey sections (differently organized and named), there are some categories which I think of as synthetic, in that they pull together books which were scattered in Dewey. One such category is "G MakingStuff."

In the MakingStuff category we put all the books about crafts, activities, games, drawing: in fact, anything that kids might want to do for fun, including putting on plays, magic tricks, cooking, origami and collecting stamps. This includes books on models scattered through the 620s, cooking and sewing books from the 640s, and books from many different sections of the 700s.

The category, like nearly all of our categories, is arranged by subdivisions with the name of the craft or activity organized alphabetically. The use of whole words in the call number and on the spine label, along with the picture label on each book, makes it possible for students to easily identify where the category begins and ends, and to jump from one subtopic to another.

Watching students use this section has been interesting and exciting. There is quite often a group of students clustered around the area, and students help other students to find books on a craft or activity. I watched a third grader one morning begin by looking at a book on paper crafts, and then move on to a book about how to sew, which was the book he eventually checked out. This natural and simple segue from paper craft to sewing could never have happened with Dewey: it would have entailed a jump from 735 to 646. Our cooking books have never been better used; the same goes for the drawing books and many other crafts.

Our circulation statistics bear this out. The books in this section have seen an amazing 87% increase in circulation for the first three months of the school year. This is a category that 4th grade students specifically asked for last year when we discussed with them the ways that they thought about categorizing information and books, and it has been one of the most successful areas of our new system.

Doing Away with Dewey - A Library Student's Perspective

I count my lucky stars that I have been able to fulfill my library school fieldwork hours at the Ethical Culture School's Library this Fall. It's been fascinating to witness the library's shift to their new organizational system, "METIS," aptly named after the Greek goddess of wisdom and deep thought. From my first time visiting the library, I sensed an excited energy amongst the students as they eagerly browsed the newly arranged shelves and found the books they sought. I listened as they deliberated amongst themselves where a certain book might be found, would it be in humor or sports? Is it about pets or about potions? And which of the genres does that connect to? Then, their eyes dart to the alphabetized icons displayed on the large wall, guiding them to the proper section. We have all relished that small victory in finding the right book, and it's been a joy seeing the children succeed in their intuitive searching. As a library student, I am required to learn about the various classification and organization systems utilized by libraries and at the moment I am in the midst of Dewey, that infamous decimal system that has been baffling students (and teachers) since 1876 when it was created. Observing METIS in action while learning about Dewey in school has created quite the interesting juxtaposition! Dewey's classification system works on decimals arranged in ascending order, which is inherently problematic for young children who don't yet possess the necessary decimal point know-how to navigate it. METIS is an alphabetized system, which is far more universal and practical for the children to work with. The iconic nature of METIS, with its colorful symbol for each genre/section, gives students the visual cues to make the connections they need when searching. These visuals follow through to the spine of the book, along with an extra symbol indicating the "nature" of the book: a blue star for information or a red star for imagination. It's almost like a fun game for the children to scavenge for the book they seek, but unlike Dewey's confusing numbers, they are guided by many friendly helpers along the way. In this sense, they are less dependent on the librarian and more excited to find books and read. The other wonderful advantage of a system like METIS is that it lends to "accidental" searching, allowing a student who might not be completely sure of what he or she is seeking to find a good match. For example, a student might be in the mood for a fairy tale so they would peruse the Tales section. There they could find original fairy tales alongside modern fractured fairy tales, such as Goldie and the Three Bears by Diane Stanley (which Tali read to her Kindergarteners today). With Dewey, they might never have come across this unique genre simply because they wouldn't know to search for it in the first place! Think of all the serendipitous searches to come. Ultimately, the goal of any organizational system is to benefit the user, and in our case, the students. It's about increasing the number of those small victories and giving them the tools to access the information they seek. Dewey may have its seniority and all, but I feel strongly that its place is far from the school library. After all, the school library is a place for children to freely explore and transcend the bounds of space and time through reading, and all those decimals were just weighing things down.

--

Daphna S. Amar

CUNY Queens College

Graduate School of Library & Information Studies

Vice President of QC LISSA

DELETING DEWEY ~ ELEMENTARY STYLE

by Andrea Dolloff

Although Dewey wasn't exactly "broke," we still wanted to "fix it." “Why?” you ask. Because informing a six year old that she’ll find books on magic at 793.8 didn't feel entirely helpful. And even more challenging was explaining that while Goldilocks certainly learned valuable lessons after her unlawful break and entry, she can be found at 398.209242: among the other non-fiction shelves.

This kind of mulling lead our team of librarians at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City to lay to rest the respected but rather antiquated Dewey Decimal System, and create a whole new one that we have named proudly, "Metis."

In Greek Mythology, Metis was the goddess of wisdom and deep thought. And it was exactly "deep thought" that we found ourselves steeped in…knee deep actually, for the last 8+ months. Our task was to figure out where the location of each and every book in our collection of 20,000 would make the most sense to students between 5 and 12 years old. Our goal was to create a user friendly, flexible, and intuitive system that would enhance the naturally inclined reader's experience in exploring and locating books of interest, while also reaching out to the less inclined, and create a supportive and enticing environment.

Upon reflection, we had been grappling with Dewey's system for quite some time, making modest attempts to simplify and improve accessibility for the children. But it wasn’t until December 2010, when one of our librarians shared an article about a public library in Connecticut that had done away with Dewey and created a broad subject based system for ages 0-5, that the quest truly took hold. We stood around our colleague's desk as she read the article out loud, nodding our heads in curious agreement, while interjecting occasionally, "Hmm. Nice. Cool. But it wouldn’t work here."

If you know anything about librarians, you know this: they are generally helpful, pleasant, kind, well mannered, and patient. In addition, they tend to be inconspicuously adventurous and sometimes…they can be…well, overly ambitious.

Throughout the spring sections were created by sorting through and integrating both fiction and non-fiction books based on their topic. The lower library’s (pre K - 2nd grade) experiment began with clearly defined sections for "celebrations" "scary" and "transportation" books. In the upper library, fiction was broken down into genres such as "humor" "mystery" "science fiction" etc. serving as litmus tests for ease of browsing, statistics on circulation, and overall enjoyment of the library space. The feedback from students was strikingly positive and enthusiastic, leading us to commit to spending our approaching summer realizing this vision in full.

Holding on to our convictions we arrived day-by- day, and sorted book by book. Some days were fun and exhilarating, while others were stressful and downright overwhelming. Thankfully however, almost every day was made up of rich and thoughtful conversations contemplating the most sensible and useful place for each book. Admittedly, by the last two weeks of August, as we stood in our maze of piles and piles and piles of books, we too, with tears, questioned, "Why?" But when students arrived on September 8th, 2011, not only was Metis up and running, we librarians had never felt more ready and excited about opening day.

We have yet to determine thoroughly if our system works. We believe it does but will remain open and committed to adjusting as we observe our students in action. The library belongs to them, and Metis was created to show them just that.

Next, we tackle the website!