I Want a Truck Book

It has been a whirlwind of a summer and every time I sit down to write a post something else needs to be done: books need to be cataloged; laundry needs to be folded; corn needs to be husked. But today is the day!

You might be reading this because you managed to attend our presentation at ALA "I Want a Truck Book." I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with Gretchen Casserti from Darien Public Library and Debbie Cooper from Stark County Library on using different cataloging systems with the zero to 5 set. This was such a great experience! Often, as a professional, you wish for the time to examine your practice in a thoughtful way. Writing this presentation really helped us begin to articulate what exactly we have done and why we created Metis. If you want to check out the slides you can find them on slideshare. I've also posted my original intended speech here but if you've ever heard me speak you'll know that what actually was said wasn't really the same as what I wrote. It does have all of the same points and helps to explain the slideshow.

We've been working this summer on writing a FAQ, a how-to workbook, and reproducing our labels so that other libraries can use them. Hopefully, you're going to start seeing some of this posted here soon. As always, if you have any questions please send us an email.

The Joy of Metis

A couple of my favorite things about our new category system Metis, are the proud independence and literal joy I witness daily when students begin their search for books to take home.  

Today for instance, a second grade girl called out, “Andrea, will you help me find a book?”  Answering her with my standard reply, I said, “Sure Alice.  What kinds of books do you like?”

“Funny!” she declared emphatically.

“OK, so where do you think you could find a funny book?” I asked.

Confidently, she pointed to the humor shelves.   Within moments she picked up a book called Spooky Riddles and started reading out loud…seemingly, to whomever would listen: “What yard will kids never play in?” she bellowed. 

She grinned as 4 other students came toward her quietly and curiously, waiting for the answer.  “A graveyard,” she roared. This triggered not only a stream of laughter, but also a desire for everyone else to pick up his or her own joke book.  While the other students took turns cracking each other up with their own jokes, Alice made her way back to me and questioned privately, “Andrea, what’s a grave yard?” 

Ahhhhh…the joy of independent browsing.

Searching vs. Browsing?

In response to a post about Metis on the ALSC blog, some commenters argued that we were mistaken in being concerned about our students understanding the way that Dewey worked, and that all that mattered essentially was that one could search for items in the online catalog, obtain the call numbers and then locate the items on the shelves. That got me thinking. Most of our work in this area has been in relation to elementary age children, but these statements seemed to go beyond that to the heart of the subject classification process itself.

As my colleague Tali pointed out, if all you need from shelf order is a code that you can locate on the shelf, what is the point of an elaborate classification system? One might as well put books in accession number order. It would certainly save a whole lot of trouble.

There must be a reason why subject order was chosen by Dewey to organize the physical collection. Amazingly enough, I found the first edition of Dewey (1876) on Project Gutenberg. I thought he might explain why he chose subject order, but in his introduction he seems concerned mainly with the internal order of his system and the use of decimals. It seems as though the prevailing system at the time was one in which there was a fixed location on the shelves for each item, which would not change as the collection grew. One of Dewey's innovations was relative location, in which items were placed in relation to each other and might move to different shelves as the collection grew. He discusses these issues, but more or less assumes the validity of subject order.

So what is the point of a shelving system arranged by subject? A.C. Foskett, whose textbook (The Subject Approach to Information) I used in library school, has this to say:

"There will be many occasions when readers will approach the collection without any particular need in mind but wishing instead to be able to select items at random. To help in this situation, our system should permit browsing; a reader should be able to follow a casual train of thought as well as a planned search.” (London: Library Association, 1996; 5th ed., pg. 26)

Later in the same book he asks, "Why is classified shelf arrangement helpful?" and answers:  "There are two important reasons. The first is to satisfy the browsing function; readers like to wander round the shelves and find books which attract them." (pg. 213)

Similarly, Robert M. Losee of the UNC Chapel Hill Library School writes that "the classification system essentially supplies a browsing path from one documents to another."  (“How to study classification systems and their appropriateness for individual institutions.” In Classification: Options and Opportunities, ed. Alan R. Thomas. Binghamton, NY: Haworth, 1995, pg. 45)

So if we acknowledge that the reason for a subject-based shelving system is to permit browsing, we then surely have to ask the next question:

What kind of subject-based classification system is going to encourage the users of my library to browse productively so that they are led to books which are of interest to them? We think that this is a question worth asking and trying to answer, rather than submitting to the monopolistic dominance of Dewey as a supposed one-size-fits-all system.

The question puts users at the center of the issue, and keeps them there. Ultimately, that is the essential thing.

"I Vant to Read about Vampires"

     Sans the accent, this is a question we get all the time these days. The interest in vampire books is still riding high, even though the heyday of Twilight, at least among would-be younger readers, seems to be over. 
     I recently bought five books in a series called Vampires (Rosen, 2012) and was cataloging them this morning. The books had arrived with Dewey numbers on their spines, which needed to be changed to call numbers in our new system, Metis.
     This simple process turned into a wonderful illustration of how our system parts ways with Dewey, and why we wanted to leave Dewey behind us.
     Each book in the series had a different call number, by discipline or subject area: Vampires in Mythology was in 398, Vampires in Literature in 809, Vampires in Film and Television in 791.43, Transylvania: Birthplace of Vampires in 949.8, and Dracula: The Life of Vlad the Impaler in B VLAD.
    I categorized them all in U SCARY MONSTERS.
When my newest vampire fan comes in tomorrow morning, I'll tell him to look in the "Scary" section under "Monsters." I'm confident he'll find them all with ease, and that the film buffs, literary experts and history fans won't miss any of them.