I am working on an IBBY project which involves reading around 140 Australian children's books in order to select one for inclusion on the prestigious IBBY Honour Book list for Illustration.
Here are some past Australian inclusions on this list (for illustration). You can see all previous Honour books here.
Prior to visiting a local public library here in Sydney I reviewed my list and checked the library catalogue for the 77 books that I have not yet read. Of the seventy-seven, forty-eight were held in the library. I was pleased (in some ways) to see twenty-four of these were out on loan. So, I was prepared to spend a few hours reading twenty-four titles from my list.
Now comes my problem. I did not expect the picture books to be easy to locate. Most public libraries here in Australia do not shelve using the book call numbers for picture books. It is all a bit strange because they do go to the trouble to label their books for example E for Picture Book followed by the first four letters of the author's surname so we have E HARR for a book written by Pip Harry. Even though the picture books are not shelved in formal alphabetical order, this library do at least keep them in surname groups - a shelf and bin for A surnames, and B surnames etc. So, I was able to locate nearly all the picture books I wanted although this did take a fairly long time because of this 'disorganised' shelving system. In the end there were only two that I just could not find even though the catalogue told me they were available.
The nonfiction is where this all fell apart. This library does use the Dewey Decimal System - and that is great because I am, as you would expect, completely familiar with this BUT they do not shelve using these labels. The books are put into subject sections which can contain many Dewey Numbers. This is not exactly gentrification but that is the term you might use. Dewey is designed to bring books on a subject together, so I am utterly confused as to why the library has set out their nonfiction in this way. Remember, I did review their online catalogue prior to my visit. Nine of the twenty-four books on my list were nonfiction. When I recorded their call numbers at home I did not realise I needed to add a subject. I thought it would be easy to find [578.47] but alas no. This is a book about animal camouflage. I should have recorded more than the Dewey number - I need to know it was on the shelf of books with the label animals. The whole nonfiction collection for children in this library is just one short row with four or five book bays but it is almost impossible to quickly locate books using data from the catalogue. A kind staff member did offer to help me but she needed to check the catalogue herself to find the subject label and also view the book cover. I am a trained Teacher-Librarian with over 35 years of experience - I would not have expected to need help locating books in a library.
To add to this confusion the library also has a classification for Easy Nonfiction and these ARE shelved in Dewey order. Actually, I sighed with relief when I went to this shelving bay.
I wonder:
1 comment:
As someone who has taken over three different school libraries in the last few years. The mismatch between catalogue and shelving has been so frustrating. I generally find that most people don't use the computer catalogue as a starting point, but even so the computer catalogue SHOULD tell anyone where to find the book.
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