My first thought about the hypothetical question of separating out books that are LGBTQ fiction and Urban Fiction from the general collection and placing them in their own special area is a knee jerk reaction/response of "no." Here are my reasons for saying no to this:
- I don't like the idea of "othering" books and making them separate from the rest of the library collection. I'm a bigger fan of making sure that a fiction collection is diverse and representative of everyone. I'm also a fan of making the library online catalogs easier to use, that way people are more likely to find the titles they want to read.
- With the rise in book challenges and especially of LGBTQIA+ titles, I think separating out the books would put a bigger target on them.
- I'm just not a big fan of separating books out into genres. I think it takes away from people finding books that they would enjoy but would not come across if the books were shelved in separate areas.
This question reminds me a little of the debate about putting genre stickers on library materials. I've worked at libraries that have the genre stickers and use them to separate out books into separate shelving locations and I've worked at libraries that have no genre stickers and shelve all genres together. The first library I mentioned eventually did away with shelving their book genres separately but decided to keep the genre stickers and shelve all the books together. This was seen as a way to make both groups of library users happy, the ones who liked the ease of the genre stickers and those that found the whole system confusing, especially when an author would write in more than one genre and then be shelved in two separate locations.
This example is all to say that I think the answer to this question depends on the library community and its library users.
Mary, I like your comparison to separating by genre. I agree that that practice can be so difficult and arbitrary. We have mystery and SF separated out at IndyPL but that means some authors are in two places or that something I'd consider SF is mysteriously in the Fiction section instead. It's confusing even with only the two genres, I can't imagine having more sections and having to decide what goes where!
ReplyDeleteMary,
ReplyDeleteI found your post on this topic to be very compelling! Especially your last remark about the genre stickers. Can I ask how that worked, exactly? My library shelves all materials by genre label and call number (sci-fi/fantasy, mystery, western, fiction, non-fic, etc.) so the idea of a library not using genre labels to shelve materials is interesting. When the library wasn't using genre labels, how did they go about shelving their materials? Did they shelve alphabetically? By call numbers? I'm very curious!
The library shelved all fiction titles together, alphabetical by the authors last name, then alphabetical by the titles. They also had series information on the books spine labels to keep series together. Honestly, I think it all just depends on your library and your library community. The ultimate goal is for readers to find books they want to read and that could mean organizing books in all kinds of ways :)
DeleteExcellent response. Full points!
ReplyDelete