Don't put that there!

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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
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