Let’s Put Dewey Decimal Books Where Students Can Find Them!

Posted on March 3, 2019 by Barbara Paciotti

School Librarians strive to create a student-friendly library. For me, this means minimizing the time it takes students to find what they need. Accordingly, I tell them to search the OPAC By Subject and the results will show them the Dewey number for the location of those books. Unfortunately, there’s nothing more frustrating to a student—or to me—than getting a list with several widely different Dewey numbers.

Every one of us, at some point, wonders why a book has a Dewey Decimal Number that places it in a certain location, yet another book on the same topic has a different Dewey number placing it in a different location—sometimes at opposite ends of the library! Should we change the number on one of them? Which one is “correct”? What if there are several books at both—or multiple—locations?

I am not a Dewey purist, so I say we can be flexible with Dewey Decimal Numbers: put a book where students will find it.

IT’S OK TO CHANGE A DEWEY NUMBER

Remember that the Dewey Decimal Classification System was designed to organize knowledge by discipline, that is, by the field of study of those who’d use the information. Library of Congress catalogers use that principle when they assign Dewey numbers for Cataloging-in-Publication (CIP) data, and usually it works fine in our school libraries. But, sometimes the Dewey number for adults working in a field isn’t compatible with the topical curricular needs of our PreK-12 students.

Our young ones look for books by subject or topic, and they expect to find all of them together. I often change a Dewey number to put a book where students will look for it. In fact, changing a Dewey number for student access actually fulfills the very purpose of Dewey Classification: “works that are used together to be found together.” For kids we can take some creative license and redo the numbers on books if they will be more useful in another location.

I know there are arguments against changing Dewey numbers, but I believe they lack validity. Here’s my reasoning:

Don’t worry about “the next librarian.” Who of us has memorized DDC numbers past the 10 main classes? The next librarian will be as concerned about student access as we are, and will be grateful that books are where everyone can more easily find them.
Finding something in a different library? Who remembers the Dewey number of a particular book? A book search will tell them the location of any book in that library. So what if it’s different from ours as long as they can locate it.
Even professional catalogers may disagree about where a book “belongs.” That’s straight from the cataloging professor when I took the course for my library degree!
The most compelling argument for making changes is that LOC and OCLC continuously make changes to DDC to meet the changing needs of society. Each new publication of DDC and Abridged DDC has numerous pages of Dewey number additions, deletions, substitutions, and revisions that have been made since the previous publication. Sometimes they’ll change a whole section, like moving pets from the 500s to 600s or travel guides from the 600s to 900s. Dewey is meant to accommodate patron needs.

USEFUL MODIFICATIONS USING DEWEY NUMBERS

For books with multiple subjects, DDC follows the rule of two or rule of three. This means books are assigned to the first, or lowest, Dewey Decimal Number that includes both/all disciplines. If you weren’t aware of this, it may explain why certain books are where they are…especially so many in the 300s!

These 2 rules are particularly annoying when applied to computer books, typically found in 004 and 005. When students are looking for books about computers, they’re thinking of the manufactured physical product. Since the 600s are Applied Science & Technology, that’s where students are more likely to look for it, and since I changed such books. the computer books are checked out much more than they were in the 000s.

Sometimes it makes sense to group books together in one Dewey class to make them all more accessible. A librarian’s recent LM_NET post asked about David Macaulay’s book “Unbuilding,” a fictional dismantling of the Empire State Building. It was classified in 690 Buildings, but she had 3 books on the construction of the Empire State Building in 974.71, which is the number for the State of New York’s History.

Historians (and perhaps NY students) would expect to find a significant event like ESB in the history of New York State, but who else would? My middle school library had books on buildings (including several by Macaulay) scattered in 300s, 600s, 700s, 900s, even 000s (about libraries!). I changed them all to 690 Buildings where students would more logically find them, and within a few days the shelf was bare…boys saw them and couldn’t check them out fast enough!

HELPFUL ALTERNATE DEWEY NUMBERS

To make a Dewey section more useful for students we may need to make a more extensive alteration of Dewey numbers. One of the first changes I made resulted from an elementary librarian’s suggestion on LM_NET. Few of us have 398.2 Folk literature differentiated between fairy tales, legends, fables, myths, and tall tales, yet that’s how our students study them. There are already Dewey numbers that align with these literary types as a better way to organize folktales. These changes rejuvenated my folktale section, and I’m sure they will do the same for you:

Fairy tales=398.21 Paranatural beings of human/semihuman form
Legends=398.22 Legendary or mythological persons
Fables=398.24 Plants & animals, real & legendary
Myths and creation stories=398.26 Physical phenomena
Tall tales=398.27 Everyday human life, historical/quasi historical events
Multicultural tales I changed to 398.23 Places and times from 398.2089. That allowed me to reduce 2 decimal numbers then add one back indicating continent of origin according to Table 2 Geographic areas.

Another mess is the 920 Collected biographies. A spine label with 920 and the author’s 3 letters is not user-friendly for anyone, especially not for kids. DDC offers an alternative called Option A, which uses numbers 921-928 to align with main Dewey Classes! I used them to completely redo my 920s. Students loved the change and circulation of those biographies dramatically increased!

CREATIVE ADJUSTMENTS TO DEWEY

Addictive Substances was a problematic topic for my students because it appears in 3 different Dewey numbers—362.29, 613.8, and 616.86—depending on whether the book is about addiction as a social problem, as personal health & safety, or as a disease. To simplify access for students needing books about drugs, I decided to put all the books in 616.86.

Here’s the “creative” part: For similar drugs the Dewey number additional decimals are wildly different. After careful analysis, I decided to adjust some of the thousandths numbers to create a more consistent grouping of drugs for 616.86. Students immediately noticed the larger drug section, thought I’d purchased new books, and their circulation skyrocketed. Learn more about creative Dewey in my e-Book, available in my TPT store.

LOC and OCLC have begun to make DDC culturally responsive, but School Librarians must be especially responsive to the diversity of students we serve. DDC’s application of expansion numbers for racial, cultural, ethnic, and national groups is inconsistent. In a search for something that could apply across all Dewey numbers, I found that Table 2 Geographic areas lists numbers for the continents that can be added as an identifier. It’s the familiar one added after 9 in the 900s. I decided to use them as “Continent of origin” for cultural and ethnic grouping, so I’ve adjusted and even created numbers in various sections of the school library to overcome Dewey’s racial and cultural biases. You can read more about it in my e-Book!

I applied this “Continent of origin” concept to books in 305.8 Groups of people, 398.23 Multicultural folktales, and 920 Collected biographies. My biggest change was gathering books together to create two completely new sections in 973 U.S. History: 973.04 Multicultural U.S. History and 973.08 Multicultural America about which I’ve written before.

I made other significant changes to 973 U.S. History by removing all the State books except our own, because a) it’s the only one our middle school students study, and b) because more accurate information about states is available online. I kept many topically relevant books found among those state Dewey numbers, and moved them to a better Dewey section, such as putting books about 9-11 in 364.1 Criminal offenses where we have other terrorism books. I also redid the Dewey number into the appropriate time period for timely U.S. history books, like the original colonies and westward expansion.

IS THIS WORTH IT?

You may be thinking, hey…this is way too much work! I admit, it takes some extra time up front, but just do a little bit at a time—not all of it at once. I typically pull out odd books while shelving, attach a stickie note with the new number, then make changes when I have a few minutes free at the circulation desk. For new books I may have to redo spine labels and cataloging for selected topics, but it doesn’t take that long.

Here are the greatest benefits for changing Dewey numbers:

It’s easier for students to browse like-topic books, which excites them.
It’s faster for students to find the books they need, which pleases teachers who seem to think students waste time looking for things in the library.
It increases circulation, which satisfies our administrators who may think the library is just an add-on.

If changing Dewey Decimal numbers changes people’s minds about our School Library Program, then I believe it is totally worth it!

I hope this has convinced you to make changes to Dewey Decimal numbers on some of your books so they are more accessible for students. There are no “Dewey Police” that come into our library to check number assignments and lock us up for making Dewey changes, so let’s go ahead and DO IT! Our students will thank us, and that’s all the reason I need.

MAKE DEWEY EVEN EASIER WITH SIGNAGE

Even with Dewey number changes, the best way to help kids locate books is better library signage. If you like the above examples of colorful labels I created for my Dewey shelves, you can get Dewey Subject Signs & Shelf Labels in my NoSweat Library store on TPT. Your students, like mine, will enjoy looking at your new signage and discovering topics within the library they hadn’t known about before!

The real key to helping students locate books is teaching them how to locate a decimal number on the shelf. Teaching the DDC is a colossal waste of time. Work with your math teachers to create a hands-on lesson about place value and sequencing. To learn more about this, read my blog post Do We Teach Dewey … or Don’t We? A School Library Lesson.

How to Inventory the School Library Collection

Posted on May 21, 2018 by Barbara Paciotti

School Librarians, can we talk?

Let’s face it: our most dreaded task is having to inventory the School Library collection.

My first one was unimaginably time-consuming and tedious, but afterward I formulated a set of procedures that streamlined the process, and I can attest that inventory needn’t be the ominous undertaking that many fear.

We can better appreciate a school library inventory if we understand why it’s important for us to do it.

WHY DO A SCHOOL LIBRARY INVENTORY

I rather enjoyed doing inventory because when finished I knew exactly what was on the shelf and what was in the online catalog…and that they agreed with each other—an important consideration when dealing with students (and teachers) who insist they “returned that book” …which, occasionally, I’d find they actually had! That, then, is the most important reason for doing a physical inventory: to guarantee agreement between the physical collection and its documented status.

No matter why, items go missing from our collection each year. It’s very discouraging to a patron and to a School Librarian to look for a needed item that’s listed in the catalog, is supposed to be there, but just isn’t. The item may truly be missing, but it may also just be mislabeled or cataloged incorrectly—no matter how careful we try to be, human error happens. Whatever the case, an inventory allows us to reconcile discrepancies. That’s another reason to do an inventory: to correct cataloging and labeling errors between an item and its MARC record.

When we have consistency between catalog and collection, we will generate accurate reports from the automation system:

A collection analysis report provides a true picture of our collection so we can weed outdated material and make purchases that develop a balanced, relevant collection. It’s also the evidence we need to request additional funding for improving the school library to meet the needs of our students and teachers.
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A loss analysis report tells us what’s really missing so we can replace important curricular materials. It also provides our yearly rate of loss which may give us the leverage we need to change library visitation policies or request a security system.
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A bibliographic and item record report reveals duplicate records and “empty” titles. If we purchase from multiple vendors, their records may not consolidate in our automation system. When we delete (for whatever reason) all copies of a title, our system may not eliminate the title record. These types of catalog entries confuse our students and frustrate us, so we want to find and correct them by aggregating multiple copies into one title and eliminating titles for which there is no item.

Finally, and not least important, we do inventory as accountability for public funds that are invested in our school library collection. We owe our taxpayers an accurate record of how we are spending their money each year, and how much the School Library is “worth.” Some states even require this type of transparency for schools by law, and we need to comply if that’s the case for us. Moreover, each year schools and school libraries are suddenly destroyed by fire, flood, or weather. An accurate inventory of a school’s library collection is the only way to assess the catastrophic loss replacement for insurance or federal/state funding.

WHEN TO DO A SCHOOL LIBRARY INVENTORY

Unless you are fortunate enough to have permanent adult aides, the school library inventory falls on your shoulders alone. I have one suggestion to make the prospect of doing inventory less daunting: create a schedule of mini-inventories over a period of several years! It makes so much more sense to do a small selective inventory every year than to tackle a huge one every 4 or 5. Mini-inventories are quicker and easier, you’re less likely to make mistakes, you don’t have to shut down the library, and your catalog and collection have a higher degree of ongoing agreement.

This is the layout of bookcases in my school library, containing some 15,000 items. With 8 aisles of books, I inventory by aisle, both sides of one Dewey and one Fiction each year over a 4 year period. Year 5 I do Professional and equipment. With far fewer items to scan, I can complete it alone in 2 days.

Image of Harlingen TX schools Library Inventory Schedule - My library shelving is continuous, but if your library layout isn't conducive to my method, you could instead use a by-Dewey-number schedule like this one I found online.

Click to enlarge

My library shelving is continuous, but if your library layout isn’t conducive to my method, you could instead use a by-Dewey-number schedule. At right is one I found online from the Harlingen, TX school district.

If you’ve read about my Fiction by Subject arrangement or my Special Collections, you’ll know that this is also a great way to do mini-inventories. By choosing to do just one or two Fiction subjects or collections each year, we can spread the fiction inventory over 4 or 5 years.

HOW TO DO A SCHOOL LIBRARY INVENTORY

Here are pre-inventory tasks you’ll want to take care of:

Repair and shelve any damaged books.
You want to be able to scan your way down your chosen section of bookshelves, knowing you have everything on the shelf that belongs there. It’s too easy to forget to scan piles of books set elsewhere.
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“Read” and weed each section before taking inventory.
It’s just so much easier to have the shelves in order before scanning barcodes, and there’s no point in tallying and reporting books that need to be cleared out of the collection. If you weed regularly, you may just need a quick look over the shelves as you read them to pull out damaged or old books. If you’ve put off weeding read my post on Weeding Dewey Books: a 6-Step Plan to simplify the task.
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Inventory all checked out items.
This is especially important when you do mini-inventories; trying to piecemeal inventory as you check-in books from the chosen inventory section is asking for errors. (If your system allows you to inventory a specific range of call numbers that are checked out, certainly do that instead of the entire collection.)

During the mini-inventory I used 3 different methods to tally the books in the chosen sections:

Scan using an inventory tool or by attaching a barcode scanner to a laptop. Either tool records the barcodes to a spreadsheet which is then downloaded into the automation system’s inventory app. This is the quickest way to do it, but with a limited number of tools in my district I couldn’t always get one, so I used both of the following methods, too.
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Pull books onto a 2-sided bookcart, scan at the circulation desk, then return the books to the shelves. This is the hardest way to do inventory and I don’t recommend it, but I used it when students were coming in & out of the library so I didn’t have to run back & forth and forget my place in the aisle. Since cart shelves are about the same length as bookshelves, I’d fit 6 shelves of books at a time, and could complete the entire aisle in 8 trips.
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Run a Shelf List report and print out, going down the shelves, highlighting books on the shelf with one color and missing books in a different color. I know it seems old school, but this method is reasonably fast for a mini-inventory and it became my preferred method after doing enough inventories to have a well-reconciled catalog and collection. (I’d scoot leisurely down the aisle in my rolling chair.) I could catch the few cataloging errors from new purchases and since the list also had current location, I use a 3rd highlighter to mark titles of still-checked-out books and check them back in later.

Here are post-inventory tasks to complete from your inventory reports:

Check in items that are still checked out but on the shelf. If any of these are items that students have paid for as lost, follow your school’s procedure for arranging a timely refund.
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Correct errors between labels and MARC records.
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Charge out missing books according to your school district policy and then run a report listing these missing books to reorder desired titles. (Ours were checked out to MISSING and at the end of the following school year, after allowing for reports and being found, we deleted them completely, including the bibliographic record if it was the only copy.)
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If using the Shelf List method, do a global/batch inventory of the call numbers on your shelf list after it’s otherwise cleared up!
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Record the inventory completion date on whatever you use to keep track of it, and be sure to include the mini-inventory in your next Report to Principal!

As you can see, performing a School Library inventory doesn’t have to be “the thing you hate most.” In fact, the satisfaction of knowing your collection and catalog are in order makes curating resources for projects, creating Special Collections for reading promotion, and collection development more productive and also more pleasurable. So, take a look around your School Library and decide which aisle or Dewey number most needs a mini-inventory and start the process, letting the rest go until another year.

Looking Backward – No Sweat Library Lessons & Management That Works

Practical Answers to Questions You Didn’t Know to Ask

Tag Archives: deweydecimals