Picture Book Neighborhoods: Define Neighborhoods

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. Last week, I shared what picture book neighborhoods are, and why we chose to reorganize thousands of books. Today, I’m going to share how we decided on which neighborhoods to create. Next week, 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!

Before we dive into our neighborhoods, let’s start with a little recap, picture book neighborhoods is a different type of organization method, specifically used for picture books. Rather than organizing the collection alphabetically by the author’s last name, in this organizational method books are categorized by theme/subject matter and then alphabetized for easy access to specific titles. 

So, as I mentioned last week, I needed to get a few key stakeholders on board with this reorganization (i.e. the children’s librarian and some other part-time staff). After working within the department on some other organizational projects, we were ready to jump into reorganizing the picture books… all 15,000 titles.

Our first step in this project was to research how other libraries have been able to organize their collection and decide on the neighborhoods we wanted to use. What’s great about this type of organizational method is that you can create neighborhoods that work best for your collection and your community. There is no right or wrong way to divide up the books. 

Beginning of Picture Book Neighborhoods

And, in fact, our library had already pulled out some titles into a mini-neighborhood situation years prior. Because of how our library is laid out, our picture book shelving is shaped like a square with an opening on two opposite sides. Unfortunately, this doesn’t allow for much growth of the collection. This resulted in books shelved on the tops of the shelves and squeezed into every little space we had.

A few years ago, we had pulled out some concept books – alphabet, colors, counting, and shapes. A number of the preschool and kindergarten classes would often come in looking for these titles. This allowed the kids to browse more easily and allowed us to pull some titles out of the picture book shelving to other shelving nearby, giving us a little more room.

Then a few years later, we found things were getting tight again. At this point, we started pulling out some of the holiday books. We pulled out the largest holiday collections we had – Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Hanukkah, and Valentine’s Day. 

I would strongly encourage you to try a mini-version of picture book neighborhoods if you’re on the fence about changing everything! Pick a category that people ask for a lot – like holidays, transportation, or favorite characters. This is a great way to begin the project without requiring you to keep going.

My children’s librarian and I searched a number of other libraries that had gone through the process of reorganizing their collections:

• Show Me Librarian
• Storytime Katie
• Mohawk Valley Library System
• Westwood Public Library
• Fletcher Free Library
• Never Shushed!

And as we did the research, we realized that there are some constants within libraries. Many libraries had a transportation neighborhood and a “favorites” category. Some libraries had a lot of categories 16+ and really narrowed down what they categorized. While other libraries kept things in broad categories, maybe 8 or so neighborhoods. I think a lot of this can be dependent on the size of your collection and just how specific you want to be.

We work really well together and decided on a few things automatically. We both agreed we didn’t want a category that was “all things girly.” And we also wanted to be mindful of our very diverse community by expanding our holiday collection to include a lot more holidays. At this same time, our local school district voted to include additional holidays into the school calendar including time off for Diwali and Ramadan.

We also wanted to find a really good number of neighborhoods. We didn’t want the neighborhoods to be so specific that the books were only a shelf or two. So, we began with 10 neighborhoods. We went into the process thinking it would take a number of meetings and we’d have to go back and forth with our decisions. But, it actually only took us really one sit-down meeting to decide on our neighborhoods.

Our first pass included:

• Holidays
• Concepts
• STEM
• Transportation
• Favorites
• Me
• Play
• Imagine
• Tales 
• Stories (catch-all)

Sub-categories

For some neighborhoods, we actually broke out a few more sub-categories. Some libraries call these streets, which fits with the neighborhood theme. These sub-categories have specific spine label stickers making it even easier for patrons and staff alike to find what they’re looking for.  For example, as I previously mentioned, our concept books were broken down into sub-categories – alphabet, colors, counting, opposites, and shapes. 

We also have a very large collection of folk and fairy tales in our library, which led us to create a neighborhood for tales. This section includes Folk and Fairy tales, but also includes nursery rhymes and books that are completely song lyrics – things like The Wheels on the Bus and Old MacDonald.

Finally, the largest group of sub-categories is our holiday neighborhood. Our holiday sub-categories include the following:

• Birthday
• Christmas
• Diwali
• Easter
• Halloween
• Hanukkah
• Lunar New Year
• Passover
• Patriotic
• Ramadan
• First Day of School
• St. Patrick’s Day
• Thanksgiving
• Valentine’s Day

Other books that don’t fit into one of these sub-categories, a book about Earth Day for example is still included in the Holidays neighborhood. It just doesn’t get a specific sticker for the holiday.

Changes

Interestingly enough, we were about a third of the way through changing over the collection and realized we actually wanted to add two more neighborhoods. We originally planned to include animal books into the STEM category. And there were just too many books! So instead, we broke the animal books into two categories. Any books that were focused on habitat or talked about animals in the real world ended up in the STEM neighborhood. While anthropomorphic animals that walked and talked like people ended up in their own neighborhood – Animals.

We also surprisingly had a lot of books that didn’t fit into any of the other categories except Stories which was our catch-all category. But what made all of these books similar, is that they were all historical in nature. Not necessarily books that fit into a nonfiction category, but were more historical fiction in nature. So, we created an additional neighborhood for this group of books – History. We never thought we’d have enough books to create this neighborhood, but it ended up that we had way more than we expected! 

We were also surprised by how few dinosaur books we had. A few staff members pushed hard for a dinosaur-specific category. Dinosaur books are really popular in our library. But, after running a few reports in our ILS, I realized the number of books we had didn’t constitute a separate neighborhood. So, in the end, we decided to include dinosaur books with our animal category. But, what we did was include a dinosaur spine label sticker on these books. We shelved these directly after the animal books to make it easier to find them, similar to the other sub-category groups in concepts, holidays, and tales. 

Overall, as I mentioned our initial planning meeting went very quickly creating our neighborhoods. Although, it did morph throughout the process as we added two additional neighborhoods and better understood what went where. Want to learn more about what picture book neighborhoods are? Check out last week’s post for the beginning of this series. Stop by next week to learn more about how we actually re-labeled all of our picture books. I also want to share what the labels looked like, and the ins and outs of the actual work.