Week 14 Prompt Response

I find this to be a particularly difficult question to answer, quite honestly.  I think that how you organize your material is really dependent upon the readership of the library, what you circulate, and what you acquire.  If it makes sense to create a focused space for a particular library genre, you should do it. To some degree, signage costs money, so it’s nice to keep your genre schema fairly flexible, and I feel like sometimes people overvalue the need for extremely precise genre labels. As a former page/shelver, I think it’s a pain to constantly have to readjust shelve labels. 

I’m a fan of keeping the genre system relatively simple.

I work at a very small public library, and I find that one of the genres that checks out the most is Amish fiction—so it makes sense for us to have an Amish fiction section. Materials circulate so well that it should probably be expanded. However, we don’t have an LGBTQ section and we don’t have a Street Lit section.  We still provide access to titles in those genres, and people can still search for titles in those genres via our OPAC, but they don’t tend to circulate well enough to necessitate a designated browsing space. We have a generic “paperbacks” section where a lot of the pulp stuff goes. I also feel like these genres can be incorporated into other genres designations, like Romance, and the general Fiction section is always the catch-all.  It’s a logistical decision, to some degree—I don’t think we should regard genre labeling as philosophical or political.  If we isolated those genres at my library, they’d only probably fill up 2 or 3 shelves, so I think it’s the right call not to separate them out.  And again, this is why we have OPACs, to some degree. However, if the collection was bigger, and those titles circulated better, I’d have no problem pulling the trigger on creating a space for them.