Picture Book Neighborhoods: What & Why

During the month of September, I’m going to share the ins and outs of how and why we reorganized our picture book collection in my library from typical author’s names to picture book neighborhoods. Today, I’ll share what picture book neighborhoods are, and why we chose to reorganize thousands of books. Next, I’m going to share how we decided on which neighborhoods to create. And I’ll take you behind the scenes into our process. I’ll make sure to include what worked and also what we probably should have done differently. And finally, I’ll share the outcomes, including what our patrons think of the new organization method!

What

But, before I get carried away, let’s start with what picture book neighborhoods are. Picture book neighborhoods are a new-ish way to organize a picture book collection. It’s been about ten years since I first started hearing about this concept of organization and was intrigued. The first time I heard about picture book neighborhoods was at a library conference presentation. And I’ll be honest, my mind was blown! My first thought was, this could never work in my library! But, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. I kept coming back to it, mulling over the idea and trying to see how it could work in my own library.

Traditional Organization

Typically, you’ll find most libraries organize their picture books alphabetically by the author’s last name. This organizational method is great if you know the author of the book you’re looking for. But, most parents/babysitters/grandparents don’t know this information off the top of their heads. Who has that information? A lot of librarians. They have great stores of knowledge about books, authors, illustrators, and subjects. But, that requires a patron to do one of two things – 1.) use the catalog successfully and find the information they’re looking for, or 2.) walk up to a librarian (which can be intimidating) and ask for help. Both of these options fail to mention the child actually looking for the book for themselves. Pre-readers have a distinct disadvantage of not being able to read, meaning they can’t find a title on their own, except for browsing the collection.

Picture Book Neighborhood

Rather than organizing picture books by the author’s last name, instead, you organize these books into broad subjects or categories. These subjects or categories are considered your “neighborhoods”. Depending on the size of your collection, your community, and what you want to categorize together, the number of neighborhoods will change. A sneak peek into upcoming weeks – we started with ten neighborhoods and actually ended up with twelve. In most libraries, they color code these neighborhoods making them easy for little ones to find!

If you’re looking for more information about picture book neighborhoods, libraries like Darien Library presented at national conferences sharing their process. Other librarians/bloggers posted about their process as well, like The Show Me Librarian and Storytime Katie. If you search picture book neighborhoods, you’ll find more great examples of libraries that have gone through the same process.

Why

The ever-present example of searching for picture books is of a child looking for a “truck book.” As I mentioned earlier, in a typical set-up, a parent or librarian has to look in the catalog to find the authors who have written books about trucks and then search through the collection to find the titles. In a picture book neighborhood library, you’ll often find a “transportation neighborhood” where all the books about cars, trucks, trains, and planes are housed together. The collection is much smaller than ALL the picture books allowing kids to browse themselves and successfully find what they are looking for!

And what’s great is that organized properly, picture book neighborhoods are still searchable in a catalog. This means, that finding specific titles is still very easy. You’ll be able to find what neighborhood the book lives in and who the author is, allowing you to find exactly where that book should be.

With 15,000 picture books in my library’s collection, this was a massive undertaking and not one to be taken lightly. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like it was the right thing to do. I wanted to empower pre-readers to find the books they love and discover new favorites. But, at the same time, ensure that we could easily find any book in the collection through the use of the catalog.

First Step

The first step was to convince my children’s librarian. She was a little hesitant at first, to be honest. And I totally respect that, this project would be a lot of work and training for both staff and the public. But over the course of the past year, we’ve moved and changed a lot of different parts of the children’s collection. All of these small projects inevitably paved the way for our picture book neighborhood project, even allowing us some more shelf space to expand our picture book collection for easier browsability.

Once our children’s librarian was on board, we spoke with a few other part-time employees to gain their insight and feedback as well. I think this can be a very valuable step in your planning process. These staff members both had a lot of great information in terms of what patrons were looking for and what our collection looked like. It was surprising, in some instances, to find what was popular for our patrons and how many books we actually had to check out. In the coming months, we’re going to be using a lot of data to purchase more heavily in neighborhoods that are very popular as well as in areas that need more attention.

Now, with a few key staff members on board, it was time to start planning! Check back next Wednesday as I explain how we decided to define the neighborhoods for our collection. And how we decided our information would display in the catalog and on the spine label to make sure books were easy to find by patrons and staff alike.