During my first two years as being a librarian here at West Potomac, students always came in and asked me similar questions. 　I like mystery books, where are the sports books, etc.? 　This got me to think about when I was going to school to be a librarian, one of the "hot topics" was "genre-fying" a library collection. Wait, say what, what in the heck is she talking about?!?!?

Genre-fying is an organization scheme that organizes books of the same type into groups in the fiction section. 　Before last school year was over, I looked at other libraries in Fairfax County to see if which genre categories they used when genre-fying. 　Based on that, I determined that we would use the following genres: Classics, Humor, Adventure, Sports, Historical Fiction, Realistic Fiction, Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Mystery and Horror/Thriller. 　After that decision, I ordered labels/stickers so we could organize the books. 　This summer, the Librarian Intern (Ms. Wolin) assisted me and we spent about 100 hours reorganizing the entire fiction section. 　We did have the help of other people for a few hours here and there, but it’s too many people to name here. 　First, we determined what genre the book fell into and put a label on the book. 　If we couldn’t tell by reading the book jacket, we’d look the book up on Goodreads. 　Then we sorted the books by genre, and organized them alphabetically by author and title. 　The last step was to figure out the order of how to arrange the genres in the stacks and put the books back. 　As I said, this took us about 100 hours, and we did this in about two and half weeks.

So far, I think the results have been amazing! 　Students are having a much easier time finding books that they like. 　Have you visited the library this year? 　What do you think of the new arrangement of the fiction section? 　Stop by and let us know. 　

Mrs. Landon