Don't put that there!

By -
Good morning! As we heard towards 2014, I'm thinking about all the posts that I meant to post over the year. Mostly, all the questions that I've wanted to ask and never seemed to find the time to ask. Some of them will come around in 2014, I'm sure. But, for today, the question is about: Short Stories!

Where do you put your short stories? When I first started here, we put short stories in the non-fiction number of 808.3. Which was the how to write fiction number. But, it was legacy cataloging, and so the number didn't change. Then, when we switched to putting short stories into the fiction (or genre) area with the rest of the fiction, there was a little consternation about the difficulty of finding just short stories. There were ideas of adding a short stories qualifier to the call number so that all the short stories would fall together at the beginning or the end of the fiction run. We didn't do that, but I have been forever curious since that conversation.

Do you have a separate area for short stories? Are they just mixed in with the general fiction/genre areas? Are they in the 800s? When I was doing some casual research for this question, I found that they could go several places. 808.83 or 813.0108... American short stories, 823.0108.... British short stories...etc.

Hit me with the comments. Thanks!

Comments

Unknown said…
We used to have a separate shelving area for short stories with the call number SC TITLE (also then broken up by genre, SC Rom Title). When my location reopened, we put everything together so SC Best is between F Best and F Besty (or whatever). Also, our collection is not broken up by genre so everything is together. This has made it harder for some people who are only looking for short stories, but I think they generally get more play being in the regular browsing area (and not shoved off into some forgotten corner).
December 30, 2013 at 10:20 AM
Robin Bradford said…
I think ours get more play too, being in with the fiction (or genre) where it fits. But, like you said, we had a few complaints from people who were wanting the shop by format, not by genre. Interesting! Thanks for the reply.
December 30, 2013 at 3:13 PM
3goodrats said…
Ours are at the end of the fiction section. Instead of FIC Author they are labeled SS Title. Collections of stories all by the same author are interfiled in Fiction under that author; the SS collection is just for collections with different authors. It's a small section and I think it's been passed over by patrons a lot, but recently we put a display nearby to highlight it and that seems to have helped.
January 4, 2014 at 2:54 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tips for Weeding Your Reference Collection

By -
If you are responsible for collection development in just about any size or kind of library, the chances are good that there's been a recent push to reduce the size of your print reference collection.* Print reference materials are, to use a regional expression, wicked expensive. They are also being used less and less as librarians turn to databases and patrons turn to the immediate gratification of the internet. As budgets decline and libraries look to use their space in new and creative ways, physical reference collections are obvious targets for heavy weeding. Here at my library, we are reducing our reference collection by 50%. At our branches, reference collections will be cut by 75% . . . this time around. So where do you start when you are lucky enough to get the assignment to chop chop chop? Before You Begin Get a firm idea of how much the administration wants to reduce the reference collection. Survey the collection and determine how much you're going to have to weed
Read more

What the Heck is Denewing?

By -
Image
"Denewing" is the term I invented for the process of taking books from the new shelf and changing their status to, for lack of a better word, "not-new." Sure, I could farm the work out to other people in my library, but it's never been clear to me why I would when denewing presents the perfect opportunity to see what has been circulating, how many times, and (thanks to Evergreen, our new ILS) the last library at which an item was checked out. Plus, peeling stickers = therapeutic. Denewing is something I can do on desk while I help people with their various computer issues. Denewing also makes your new shelves look better. Because space is at such a premium in most public libraries (although regular weeding could help with that-- cough ), the New Shelf is the place where we have the best opportunity to showcase what we're buying and catch people's attention. The new shelf should be positioned somewhere where it will catch patrons' eyes and shout (it
Read more

The black shelves are over there.......

By -
Speaking of collection maintenance... A question that has come up time and time again (in the real world, in the twitter world, on blogs, at conferences...) is the idea of separate shelving for African American books. If you follow me on twitter, you've heard this rant before. Why do we segregate books by skin color, blah blah blah. And, really, it isn't even the skin color of the character that matters, but the skin color of the author . You won't find the Derek Strange books (by Pelecanos...go read them now!) the AF-AM section. I've tried to trace this back to see where it began because it wasn't always this way. Books used to be shelved by genre in fiction, and by Dewey in non-fiction. My guess (and it's only a guess) is that once upon a time there wasn't much in the way of current, popular fiction written about black people by black people. There was Terry McMillan...and there were others, but she was the big household name. Lots of people came int
Read more