I Have a Confession to Make

By Brenda Anderson, Children's Librarian

I have a confession to make. I used to pull books off the library shelf and then cram them back on the shelf willy-nilly. Sometimes not even in the general area I had found the book in the first place. In my defense, I wasn’t aware each book had a specific place on a library shelf, its own address, a place it calls home. In the library world this address is referred to as a call number. It’s the letters and sometimes numbers on the spine sticker of the book.

When a book is put back on the shelf somewhere it doesn’t belong, that book is lost. It will be missing when someone else wants it because the book isn’t in its spot. The book longs to be in the spot where it calls home. So please don’t put library books back on the shelf . It’s all right to leave a book next to the shelf instead of trying to put it away. We’ll make sure the book gets back home where it belongs. And that concludes the public service announcement of this blog post.

Speaking of the address of a book, the children’s department has been trying to make it easier to find where a book is located. The picture books about particular Holiday, Season, or Concept such as the Alphabet, Counting, Colors and so forth are grouped together in their own section. No more searching the entire collection for the books about a certain character, say Curious George. These are now on the shelf under “Cur” instead of the first three letters of the author’s last name. This means that all the Curious George books are located together instead of four different places under four different authors.

We plan to use shelf labels with pictures as well as the name of the topic or book character written out. These will be like street signs to direct you to the address you seek. The holidays, seasons, concepts, book characters, series name of the chapter books as well as the topics in the non-fiction area will be marked with shelf labels that stand up like a book. I think we should make a map of where items are now located. This would be helpful to not only the patrons but also to us librarians who automatically go to where the book used to be.

I also would love to have signs above the aisles marked like a grocery store stating what is located on the shelves in that area. Why not? We already have shopping carts. I welcome any feedback or suggestions. Our goal is to make the books easier to find and check out. But please don’t try to put them back on the shelf.