Picture Book Neighborhoods: The Process

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. Previously, I shared what picture book neighborhoods are, and why we chose to reorganize thousands of books. Last week, I shared how we decided on which neighborhoods to create. Today, I’ll take you behind the scenes into our process. Looking back now, I’ll be able to give you tips and tricks on what worked and what we 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. 

Color-Coded Labels

Now that my children’s librarian and I had decided on our neighborhoods or themes, we needed to decide on how we would label the books. As well as how to actually separate them into each of the neighborhoods. As a reminder, we started with the following neighborhoods: 

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

And in the end, also included Animals and History. But, how would you easily recognize which books were included in which category? Most libraries we found had used a transparent colored label protector that covered their spine labels to make a visual marker. We decided on using the Demco Color-tinted Glossy Label Protectors for a few reasons. One, they had a variety of sizes and we found one that would work with our spine labels. Two, they offered a wide range of colors that would work for the number of categories we had chosen. And finally, Demco is a library-focused company which means that we expect that these labels will hold up to all the love that picture books get from little readers. The library also hadn’t used anything like this in the past. And so we weren’t in danger of repeating their use in another collection.

Neighborhoods & Colors

We chose to use a lot of the bright, fluorescent colors to make it easier to see on the books. Then went to the pastels, thinking it would be easier to read through. So as not to confuse people, we were also conscious of not trying to choose too many colors from the same family – too many greens or blues. We were also concerned that some of the darker colors might be more difficult to read through. The darkest color we selected was purple and the red. Both are still very easy to read the text underneath. We also calculated the cost and found that one of these stickers was still cheaper than using two regular, clear label protectors on a typical book (our spine labels for these books are a little larger than our label protectors).

We were also very specific about which colors ended up with which categories to some extent. Our concept books (already pulled from the regular picture book collection) used a purple sticker. We ended up getting rid of that sticker but used a light purple label protector to kind of coincide with the color that we had already used. We used a light green for the STEM collection and used fluorescent colors on sections that we thought would be very popular – Transportation, Me, and Favorites. And our Holidays neighborhood used the bright red label protectors which felt very celebratory.

Spine Labels & Accessibility

After figuring out visually how the books would look, we turned to the actual spine label. It was daunting to think of actually re-labeling 15,000 books. I had no desire to individually type up a label for each and every title. But, my children’s librarian was adamant that the label had to also tell staff and patrons where the book was shelved. It would also help to make the collection even more accessible, to those users who are color blind, or color vision deficient. They don’t have to rely on the color, they can still read the spine label and know how to find what they’re looking for.

After digging into our ILS, we found a way to create record sets of books, change the call numbers with a bulk change, and then also be able to print new labels in bulk as well. The books are labeled E NEIGHBORHOOD, AUTHOR’S LAST NAME, PUBLICATION DATE in most cases. In recent years, we’ve begun adding the publication date to the spine label, to help browsing patrons find recent titles. So, let’s use the book Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site by Sherri Duskey Rinker as an example. The spine label would be:

E TRANSPORT
RINKER
2011

Then over the top of the spine label, we placed a fluorescent green label cover. This means that even without the color label protector, staff and patrons know exactly where this book should be shelved.

First Steps

Now, that we had decided on what the spine labels would look like, it was time to start figuring out how to actually do the work. As I mentioned last week, we had already created a mini-neighborhood collection with concept books as well as a few holiday books pulled out of the collection. We started re-labeling those first. They were the easiest books to do because they had already been organized.

I do want to pause here to say that we originally only put the word “concepts” or “holidays” in the catalog, but after starting the project we knew we needed more clarity for our neighborhoods that had organized sub-categories or streets. So, then we made sure to include the neighborhood and also the street to make finding the books that much easier. We did not include the street on the spine labels (there just wasn’t enough space), but any book that is categorized with a street has an additional sticker for identification. So, for example, Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert would have the spine label:

E CONCEPTS
EHLERT
1996

But the catalog would read:

E CONCEPTS
ALPHABET
EHLERT
1996

Then on the actual book, it would also have an alphabet sticker to identify the street sub-category. We found a lot of these types of stickers on Demco, but also ended up making our own for a lot of the subcategories that we couldn’t find online – especially some of the holidays we wanted to highlight. We searched for clip art style images that were available for use and then purchased labels and printed them ourselves.

The Actual Work Part

The concepts and holidays were simple categories to do. Once we had re-labeled these books, we were ready to tackle the larger collection. We started by pulling books that were easy to categorize – transportation titles are some of the easiest! The easiest way to do this is to start by searching the catalog for keywords and creating lists to pull. We decided quickly that if we pulled a book and weren’t sure what to do with it, it went back on the shelf for later. 

During this process, we actually had a bunch of open shelving from some previous projects available to house these new and expanding neighborhoods. Honestly, this is probably one of the more difficult parts of the whole process – finding room for all these books as you categorize them.

I also failed to mention, that we had created a basic idea of the types of books we wanted in the Favorites section. This made it simple to pull these titles as well. Then as we went through more and more of the collection, we’d add to the favorites when we came across an author or character that was well-loved.

Additional Neighborhoods

After concepts, holidays, transportation, and favorites we got a little stuck. What neighborhood should we do next? We began pulling books that fit in the Imagine, STEM, and Play categories. And it was at this point, when I realized that we had SO many animal books. And, surprisingly, that we had more books than I expected about historical topics – more fiction based, but that could be their own category. In the end, we broke up the animal books into two areas. The books about animals and their habitats (more nonfiction in nature) ended up in the STEM neighborhood. The anthropomorphic animal books ended up in their own neighborhood – Animals. 

It was around this time that I realized that I could either go through the collection by searching the catalog for specific subject headings, and maybe getting the books I was looking for or I could work through the shelves book-by-book and start categorizing them that way. So, I started going through shelf by shelf searching and organizing the books into neighborhoods as I went. At this time, I’d only go through looking for one or two neighborhoods at a time. Thinking about them all was too overwhelming.

Full Force

It was about this time when my children’s librarian and I were chatting and we decided to take some time after hours and try to get as much done as we could. The process was taking a very long time and we wanted to make sure it was done by summer reading. So, one Saturday, after programming was finished we settled in to start going through books. We ended up working for about six hours literally taking each book off the shelf and putting it into a pile.

This is a strange project in that sometimes you need the opinion of someone else to help you work out where a book should be shelved, but for the most part, you just have to go book, by book, and keep chipping away at it on your own. We had high expectations for getting a lot done and we did, just not as much as we had expected.

Just Keep Swimming

Every book we touched ended up in a neighborhood pile. And I literally mean pile, we had books all over the floor, on top of low shelving, on empty shelves as we cleared them off, it felt like they were everywhere. For books when we wanted a second opinion, we added them into a question mark pile for us to review afterward. We also scanned all of these books into bulk record sets to ensure that they would get changed over.

It took me about a week or so to change all of these records, print out new labels, and get the re-labeled with the help of a number of staff members. Then it was back to the day-to-day work. Now that a good portion of the shelves were cleared off, I started filling a cart or two of books, putting them into categories, changing the records, labeling and shelving them. My office was constantly filled with picture books in various piles, in various stages of the process.

Next Steps

The entire process was quite arduous, especially given the size of our collection. One of the hardest parts was keeping the staff up-to-date with where we were in the process. What neighborhoods we were working on, what part of the collection wasn’t on the shelf, and how to find the newly labeled books. It was also difficult to help patrons as part of the collection was complete. And at the same time, other books hadn’t been touched and nothing was where it was going to end up in the end. 

Next week, I’ll let you know the end results – how it’s working, staff and patron feedback, what we might have done differently looking back now, and dare I say, the next steps. A quick teaser, though – I’m really proud of all the work we did and how well it turned out.
Don’t forget to look back at how we started this process and why we decided to undertake this massive project and also how we decided on the neighborhoods that we currently have.