Hi, welcome to the first session of Big Talk from Small Libraries 2022. I am Krista Porter, your host here for the day. I am the Library Development Director here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Our first presentation today is actually from our smallest library on the agenda, as far as population-served or FTE. For Big Talk from Small Libraries, all of our presenters are from libraries who have population-served or FTE of 10,000 or less. And from what you submitted, Sarah, yours is 350, I believe. Yep, all right. So, Sarah Jefferson is a Library Media Specialist at Flippin High School in Flippin, Arizona. Or, I'm not sure, sorry, Arkansas. It happens all the time. I was looking at it and my brain said the wrong thing and I immediately noticed her. Sorry. And she doesn't talk about what they did in their small school library. And this is a big topic all across in many libraries, not just school. A new way of organizing your libraries and seems to be going well in most places. So, let's hear about how Sarah did it in her library. All right, good morning. My name is Sarah Jefferson and I am the Library Media Specialist at Flippin High School. It really is called Flippin. We get that a lot too. Everybody always laughs about it. But yeah, that's our name. So, today I'm going to share with you my experiences in genre-fying my small school library. We really do have about 350 students. It actually might be less than that now. We have a lot of students who have gone virtual and so our actual student population on campus is a little bit smaller than that. But even though this is something that I did in my small school, I think that a lot of the things that I did would apply to a smaller library that is like a public library. I think that would work for them too. And so I hope that after today I've kind of given you like an idea of what it would look like in a library your size and maybe help you get over some of the pitfalls that I ran into when I was doing this for my school. So what is genre vacation? I don't know that I really need to explain this to most of you because I think that most people kind of have this. But in case you're not sure, genre vacation is the process or idea of classifying music, film, literature or other such mediums into specific genres or categories. And I got that from Urban Dictionary because I thought that that was probably the best explanation of that. So why genre thigh? Bookstores do it and why do they do it? Well, you've been in a bookstore before. Everything there is organized by genre. Why? Because it's easy to navigate and because you can find things on your own. I taught second grade for seven years before I became the high school librarian here. Big jump. But whenever I taught second grade, I genre-fied that and it wasn't really on purpose. It just kind of was easier to organize it that way. And the reason I did that is because my second graders knew what they were interested in. Not necessarily specific authors or genres, but they did know the topics that they really liked to read about. And by genre-fying my classroom, it made it really easy for them to find what they wanted without my help. Right now, most libraries' fiction section is organized in alphabetical order.  And it's not really very user-friendly. I know whenever I came into this library, we just had a whole wall of fiction books, alphabetical order, by the author's last name. And I would have kids all the time come in and say, well, I really like this book. Can you find some that are like that for me? And I would have to go through and based on what I knew about the books in my library, which was not a whole lot of the time when I first started, I would have to kind of go through the whole section and pick out books one at a time that I thought they might like. And that really wasn't the best way to do that, because one, I didn't really know my collection very well, but also because I feel like whenever you read books, you like books for different reasons. Like, if somebody tells me that they liked Hunger Games, what about it did you like? And so if there are different aspects of that that they enjoyed, the books that I was randomly selecting might not necessarily be what they were looking for. So this quote, it says, that it encourages literacy, especially for those least likely to scan a book summary or master catalog search, struggling readers, students not yet fluent in English, and those without learning or with learning disabilities. And that was from Gail Cornwall from the KQED. Now I know that I'm talking about students and you talk about patrons, but we still have a lot of the same a lot of the same people coming in. I mean, I've got mostly high school students, obviously, but you you still have people who are not fluent in English, and you still have struggling readers, and you still have people with learning disabilities visiting your libraries. So it's still relevant to your library. And then if you think about it, all of those people, all of those people that fall into those categories, a lot of them select books based on the cover art. And I'm not going to lie to you, there's some books that I have that the cover arts are really kind of hideous. It's not, it's not really cute. I can think of one in particular. One of the best books I've ever read was by S.E. Hinton, the Outsiders. And the actual copy that's in my library is not, I mean, it's not pretty at all. Like the cover is just, I mean, honestly, we're talking, honestly, it's hideous. And a kid won't pick it up. And they won't read the blurb on the inside or on the back because they pick up the book, they look at it, and no, that's not for me. So with genrefication, we can at least point them in the right direction based on their interest. So maybe even though it doesn't have nice cover art, if it's in a section that they know that they are interested in, they might be more likely to pick it up. So very seldom does someone go into the library knowing exactly what book they want. I know very seldom I do that. We're browsers. And so instead of randomly choosing books and hoping that what I grab is something I'm interested in, I can go to a section I know I like and then narrow down my search. So there's a lot less random choosing and a lot more purposeful searching. So some more reasons why you should genrefy. Mine, it's student-centered. So even for you public libraries, maybe not student-centered, but it's patron-centered. It teaches people to be more self-sufficient and gives them a little more freedom without being confusing. Going back to the part about the bookstore, most people don't like salespeople hovering. They're content to browse on their own, and when they're not, they usually ask for help. And our patrons are the same way. I mean, it's great whenever you have book recommendations, but if people don't want recommendations, they just want to browse. It does make it a lot easier when it's genre-fied. It also gives you data-informed curating, because for my collection, I can immediately look at every genre, not just on my computer. I can look at it physically and see which sections need beefing up and which sections have an abundance. So that's really kind of a benefit to me, because it's not just numbers, it's like I can see it. I can also use my library management system to see the average age of each genre. And I know that we do that whenever we're reading a lot, but it's nice to be able to look at each individual genre and say, okay, it's this old I need to add some newer books and get rid of some. And the other thing is nonfiction is usually genre-fied. You can maybe see behind me, this is my actual library. And I've got it sectioned off a little bit, but this is organized by Dewey. That's how my nonfiction is. And if nonfiction is organized by a Dewey decimal system, why? It's because it makes things easier to find in the nonfiction section. So why in the world do we lump together all of fiction? Why do we do that? I know that I have done some research and I know there are some schools that include nonfiction in their genre vacation. So they have their nonfiction and fiction books that have the same topics together. I didn't do that because I wanted to keep my fiction and nonfiction sections separate, but that is something to think about. So Kristi Mitten from Beyond the Shelves has this quote, a busy library is a funded library. And I know a lot of the public libraries, your budget is determined by your local government. Ours is determined by our school board. And if my school board sees that my library is being used for more than just a hangout spot, which don't get me wrong, that's great. But it's important for them to be using it for the books, too. That's kind of the main purpose. And so if people know that my library is being used, I'm more likely to get money when I ask for it. And so the five laws of library science, if you have gone to school to be a librarian, you're very familiar with those and I'll touch on those later. But all five of those laws really back up genrefication because it's not about what is easiest for me as a librarian. It's more about our patrons. And so when my students struggle to find what they want, or they have to ask me for help every time they come in, it becomes a chore, not just for me, but for them. And a lot of times they just avoid coming because it's easier to just not come than to have to ask for help or to spend time looking. And so when they can find books they want independently, they're more likely to come. So here's some cons. It's not all perfect. It doesn't all go according to plan all the time. It does take up more space because I do need a little bit more space to section off the book. So if I've got a pretty small genre, it's really hard to pair it up with something else on shelves so that they're separated, but not taking up a whole lot of extra shelf space. And you'll see what I mean by that in a minute when I show you some pictures. Another thing it's really difficult to identify genre in a lot of books. We have a lot of books in our library and I'm sure in yours too, where it doesn't really fit in one particular genre or another. And so for me, it was really helpful to look in a couple of different places to help me to identify what genre it best fit in. Now that doesn't mean it fit perfectly, but what would fit best. And something that helped me a lot was to keep my genres fluid. So if I had a student that read the book and was like, it really doesn't fit here. I think it fits more there. Well, they've read the book and they're likely to know better than I do. So it's something that I just kind of switch and put him in a new spot and then we're good to go. It's also really, really time intensive. I'm not going to lie to you. You have to identify every single fiction book in your collection at some point if you want to genre five. And so it did take me a pretty long time to do this. I'm lucky that I have a really good principle that was behind me on this and I did some research and I looked at numbers and we agreed to do this and he was very supportive. But this is something that may not work for a lot of you right away because you might not have that support system that I do because it does take a lot of time and effort, especially if you're a small school or a small library like I am, you don't have a whole lot of manpower to do it. Maybe you and one other person, for me, it was just me and we'll talk a little bit about that here in a minute too. But that is a con and it takes a lot of time. So how do I know if it's right for my library? Well, the first thing is you need to ask yourself what is most important for your patrons? Is it more important for them to know how to navigate the Dewey Decimal System? Or is it more important for them to be able to find and select books independently? And I know for me that answer was really simple. There's nothing wrong with the Dewey Decimal System. We all learned it in library school. If you didn't learn it in library school, you're very familiar with it now working as a librarian. But it's not a perfect system. And I feel like in a lot of ways it's very antiquated. And it doesn't necessarily work for all of our patrons. So another thing to think about, do your patrons often ask about specific types of books? So like where are the mysteries? I want to read books about werewolves. Do you have any books like The Hunger Games? Whenever you genre fire makes it a lot easier to point people in the right direction or for them to find it on their own? Because you have separated it by genre and it makes it easier to find. Another question to think about, do you find that your patrons spend a lot of time searching or don't have a clue where to start? I know that's the case for some of mine. And genrefication helps simplify that. So if you think about these questions, you might realize that genrefication is right for you. But how do you get started? So here's why I chose genrefication. Every year I do a questionnaire that I send out to my students. And their feedback showed that they wanted the new books separated from the general collection because they had a hard time finding books that they were interested in. So I started off with doing just the new books because that seemed like a really simple place to start and a good testing ground. And if it worked, we could do the whole collection. And if it didn't work, well, no harm, no foul. And once I separated the new books, the students really seemed to like that because they could very quickly find books they hadn't seen before. And after that one year, I did another questionnaire and students indicated they really liked the organization style. Now I didn't do it by necessarily traditional genres and I kind of gave them some cute quirky names. Like instead of romance, I put love is in the air and they really liked that. But I found that the new section was hit a lot more often than the old section, maybe because it was new, maybe because it was genrefied. But after the questionnaire, the students really did seem to like that they knew where to go to look for what they wanted. So here is an example of what it looked like whenever I made my new books. I made some memes whenever we were all, when we first started out in the pandemic to remind people to sanitize their hands before they touch things. So there's my Joe exotic meme that I made. But so here's my new book section. And it's kind of hard to see from here. I'll give you a closer look here in a little bit. But each shelf is a different genre. Some of them are sharing, but I have little labels here where I labeled each different genre. And I also gave each genre a specific color sticker. And like I said, it's kind of hard to see from here. But right here, this is my dystopian and disaster section. They all have these orange stickers. That really helped to be able to identify the books quickly, even if they didn't read the explanations of the genres. They got to where they knew like that bright green is magical realism and orange is dystopian and disaster and black is a twisted tale. And anyway, so it made it really easy once they kind of got the hang of it for them to quickly find what they wanted, even if they weren't they weren't reading like the the examples and the explanations. So the process, I began sorting books during the summer because I have an extended contract, which means that I get to work two weeks after all of the teachers go home and I come to school two weeks before all of the teachers come. So I have four extra weeks that I am paid to be here, which was really helpful because that's the time that I usually spend going over my collection and doing inventory and leading and things like that. So I began sorting books during the summer and really what I did is I just made a lot of big piles. And all of the books that I knew where they went, because if you know, if you know your collection pretty well, there's a lot of books that you can quickly sort. So I started putting them in piles. Whenever I came to books that I wasn't really sure how to organize, I used Goodreads and Amazon and saw kind of where everybody else shelved them and what they said didn't always help, but most of the time it got me at least in the right direction. So then I strategically placed the genres on the shelves and so that part was a little bit difficult because I would have to look at a stack of books and be like, okay, well, how can I fit all of these on this shelf or am I going to have to take up more than one shelf for it? And so I found myself putting books on the shelf and by the time I got done, I needed to rearrange again. It's kind of like doing a puzzle where if all of the pieces don't fit, you got to kind of rearrange them. That's how it was. So after I placed them on the shelves and kind of got them where I liked them, I chose colored dot stickers to denote each specific genre. And I put stickers on every single book. They weren't necessarily always in the same place, but it was on the spine somewhere so that it was easy to see. And then I made signs on the shelves with a description of the genre. And I made sure that the color of the font matched the color of the sticker just to make it easier for people to be able to pick out the genres. It did take me about 40 hours to complete. That's estimated. And that was just for that part. That was not everything that I did to Genrify. There was a couple more things that I had to do, but that's all I really had time for during the summer. And so it took me 40 hours to do that, which was a little over one full week of school. And again, that's something that might not work for every library, but it seemed like a really simple way for it to work for my school.  But I feel like this is something that could work for even bigger libraries than us. So here are the supplies that I bought in the final cost. It was actually really cheap to do this. So on Amazon, I bought some Chrome label, half inch round color coding stickers. They came in a thousand a box for $10 each. I still have.  So they've lasted me a long time. I also bought the super grip sign holders from the library store. And they were 10 to a package and they were $13.95 per package. So I ended up using 12 of the color coding dots. And then I had to buy two packages of the sign holders. And so the square shelf flag holders, they have a hinge on them so that people can flip up the sign if it's in their way. But anyway, it ended up costing me $112.90. And whenever I bought multiples, I saved a little bit of money. Again, I have a very small library. I only had 12 sections. It might cost you a little bit more if you decide you want to expand your genres. And really part of the reason that I only have 12 genres is because I don't really have enough books in some places to really call it a genre, like science fiction. I really don't have enough books in my collection to have just a science fiction section. So I kind of included them in other sections where they fit best. But it was really not that expensive. Really the biggest part of this was the time. So here are what my signs looked like. I really love Harry Potter. And so all of my signs have Harry Potter fonts to them. But what I did is I told what the what the genre was and then explained it a little bit in case it's not really clear. So I ended up having to put dystopian and disaster together because I didn't really have enough of one or the other to just do one. So I have my explanation here. Future world, mutating viruses, zombies, natural disasters, etc. I know zombies and future world don't necessarily seem to go together. But a lot of books about zombies happen because of natural causes or reactions to something that has happened in the world. So I feel I felt like they kind of they kind of go together. And this is like the hinge that the hinge label that I was talking about. So it's got this part right here that goes over your shelf. And it's got a spot to put your your label. And I just laminated these. I have a really handy dandy smaller label maker has a really, really thick lamination. And so that's what I used. And I have not had to remake these yet. And it's been two years. And then here are the chrome label stickers. And this is what they come in. And what I did is I just kind of wrote along the top what the genre was. And then I've got my little stickers here. And those are really, really handy. And like I said, there's a thousand in the box. And I have not yet had to repurchase anything, not even for my largest genre. So here is this is my new section. And here is the label for it. It's my romance section. And each book has a hot pink sticker on it. And I called this section love is in the air. Now in my backlist or my older books section, I actually named it romance. But I thought it was cute to put this little name here. Instead, the kids really liked it. And then over here, I've got another label, tough stuff, and it's sitting on my shelf here. And it says that it deals with difficult, real life things. And so it I made sure that I put an explanation because I do think that for some kids, tough stuff doesn't really get they're not really sure what's in there. So the explanation really helps. Here's another section. I've got twisted tales retellings of well known stories. And they've all got black stickers. So it'd be things like Cinder or the I have the Percy Jackson books there. Because they are partial retellings of mythology. And then I've got my magical realism here, magical elements and realistic settings that includes angels, demons, monsters, ghosts, aliens, etc. So it's kind of a broad theme. It's probably one of my bigger sections that I'm going to have to go back into and probably split again. Now that I have a bigger collection in that area. Here's my magical realism section. They've all got bright green stickers. Here is an example of this is actually a fantasy novel. It's got a dark green sticker. It's really hard to tell. But in person, it's a lot better. But this is kind of what the spine looks like up close. And then here are here's a picture of my collection from magical realism on back. And this is all my fiction books. And then here's another picture of my fiction section all sorted out. And as you can see, like some of the shelves, like the one over here on the left has a pretty big section that's been left open. But I did that because I didn't really want one genre to run into another. I wanted to be really clear whether those genres were separated. And so that was part of what was difficult is I actually do have quite a bit of shelf space open in some of my sections. But I thought that was necessary to keep the different genres separated. So more of the process. So after the summer, I to make it easier for me to find the books and for the students to find the books, like let's say they knew exactly what they were looking for, but they didn't know what section it would come in. That kind of became a little bit of trouble for me whenever kids would say, Oh, I want a Stephen King book. Well, Stephen King might not necessarily be in one section, because some Stephen King books have a supernatural element to them. And some of them are just kind of creepy stories about like normal regular people. And so they would be in two different sections. So if kids wanted to look for a Stephen King book, this wasn't necessarily the best way to do it because they had to know what kind of Stephen King book they wanted to read. So anyway, so what I did was I created locations based on genres in my learning management system. And whenever I had new books, they would get their location added during the processing phase. And really, it's as simple as a click in a new section to tell what kind of book it is. And then we're good to go. It really was very, very simple to do once I started it. And once I had all the books labeled with the sticker, all I had to do was go through and pull up their record and click the location for them. So during the school year, I edited the location for books during my free time. I mean, there wasn't a whole lot of free time, but I did have it. And so that's something that I did as I went. I didn't have time to do that during the summer. But it took me almost the whole school year to get all of my books put in new locations on our learning management system. So any books that were not finished during the school year, I edited during inventory in the summer because I already had them separated out into sections. So it made it really easy when I was doing inventory to just take them over to my desk, edit the location in the learning management system, and then put them back on the shelf. So here is, we use Destiny. And so here is what it looks like whenever I added the sublocations. Right here, it says library sublocations total is 20. All I had to do is edit that and add in my new genres so that whenever it was time for me to put my books into those sublocations to help people find them better, all I had to do was edit them. So here are some of my sublocations. This is what it looks like. And I've got a couple of extras on there that are not my fiction, but that's also for the students to be able to find books easily. So here are the genres that I picked. You can pick whatever you want. I suggest making them kind of fluid, but these are the ones that I picked. Classics, twisted tales, romance, historical fiction, tough stuff, mystery, suspense and thriller are all together. Sports, realistic fiction. And then I had alternate reality, time travel and special abilities kind of all together. So like time travel and superheroes work together because they have special abilities. Then I put together dystopian disaster, magical realism and fantasy. One thing that I did do after the first year, I realized that my classic section was getting almost no traffic whatsoever because I mean, if we're being really honest, how many high school students are going to choose to read classics, not a whole lot, especially if they know they're classics. So what I did was after the first year, I reintegrated those with other genres where they fit best and they actually got picked up a lot more often because kids didn't think, oh, I'm reading an old book. They thought, oh, I'm reading an adventure or I'm reading science fiction. So I feel like that really helped. Now there were a couple of books that I just did not know what to do with. I didn't know where to put them other than classics. And so I do have a actual classic section, but it is really, really small. And that's really books that kids will pick up for like a class. They're not really books that kids pick up for enjoyment. That's just kind of the nature of those books, I think. So here are some tips and tricks based on my experiences. Make sure you keep your genres fluid, like I said before. If you find that the book doesn't really fit there, all you got to do is put another colored sticker on top and go in and change the location in your learning management system. Put it in the new spot and boom, you're done. It's really not a lot of work. Once you've done the legwork ahead of time, moving books from one section to another is really no big deal. Sort first, then shelf. I learned that the hard way. I thought, oh, let's put them in this order because that's going to be fun. And then I got them on the shelves and they didn't fit. So I had to take them off the shelves and start again. So another thing that I touched on, if you're not sure which genre a book fits, check Amazon or Goodreads. That's really helpful. It was really helpful to me to see what other people thought. Because if you're not really familiar with your collection, there's going to be some books that even after you read the blurb, it's really not clear where it should go. And don't be afraid to make up your own genre groups. I did that. I combined some things that I felt like could go together so that they wouldn't take up a whole lot of space on their own. Don't be afraid to do that. And again, you can keep them fluid. You can move things if you need to. In fact, this last year, I had to rearrange some shelves from where they were because I increased my collection in a couple of areas and they didn't fit anymore. And then the next one is do a little at a time. I started off with just my new books. Try that and see if it works. I mean, that's my suggestion. If this seems like it's too big of a task to do, try a little bit at a time and see how it goes and see if it works for you. And if it doesn't, then put them back where they came from. And if it does, well, then just do a little bit at a time. I mean, I couldn't do all of it in the summer that I was given. So I did what I could and I worked on it over the year. Was it worth it? Well, I did have a lot faster self-selection for my students. I still had kids to come to me for book recommendations because they know I'm a reader. And I mean, that's nice. That is one of my favorite parts of my job. But it was also nice to see them be a little more self-sufficient. It was easy for me to identify popular genres because I could see when kids were picking out books from sections because I would have chunks of the shelf missing. So it helps me to see kind of what's trending with my students and what they are liking to read right now. It was also easier for me to figure out which genres needed more books. So I expanded those genres because it was easy for me to tell what had a lot of books and what didn't. And a lot of my overlooked books are getting attention because they are being put in the same section as books that students like. So maybe a book that would never have gotten picked up before is getting looked at because it's in the same genre as the Hunger Games and the kids really liked Hunger Games. So it's kind of, my weeding process has had to change a little bit because books that I thought a few years ago, yep, I'm going to have to get rid of those, have actually started getting back in the rotation now. So it's been interesting. Here are some actual numbers to go on. So my total book circulation for the 18-19 school year was 1942. Again, we're really small school. So from the 18-19 school year to the book circulation was only 1541. So the other 400-ish were things like Chromebooks and things like that. So we really only had about 1500 books circulated, which really isn't a lot. But the next year after I genre-fied, the total book circulation went up to 3095 and that was the year that we all closed down for COVID in March. And so my numbers were only good from August of 19 to February of 20. If I had been able to include numbers for March, April, and May of that year, my numbers would have been much higher. So you can see there's been almost a 60% increase from before to after genrification that first year alone. There was almost a 60% increase. It doubled the amount of checkouts for that same time span. So if you look at just August 18 to February 19 and then August 19 to February 20, that same amount of time, it doubled. So if that doesn't convince you, I'm not sure what will. So here is the actual collection report just for you to see. I had 1,942 books. I marked out stuff that wasn't books. You can see I don't have a whole lot of nonfiction books checked out. My fiction books, I only had about 1,500 down here. And those are my circulation stats for the 18-19 school year. Just August 18 to February 19, there's the 1,541. And then you can see here, we're going to include all of the nonfiction books too, but my fiction books are down here. I had 3,095 books checked out from August 19 to February 20. So if you're still not sure, what does AASL say about genrification? So what do the professionals in our field say? According to President Yates in 2018, I really try not to come down on any one side. I just think that I've not seen people that have gone to genrification then go back. There's a reason for that. Now that I have done it, I don't think I'll ever go back to having just a fiction section because it works for my students. It works for my population and it works for my patrons. So that's the more information to kind of think about what the president of AASL says. So going back really quick to touch on the five laws of library science, hopefully you're familiar with them. The first one, books are for use. If no one's checking them out, the library is not effective and it's not useful. Every reader, his or her book. There's something for everyone. JK Rowling once said, if you don't like to read, you haven't found the right book and I believe that. And it's a lot harder to find the right book if you don't know where to look. Every book, it's reader. Books aren't getting picked up because they get overlooked, either because of the cover art, the reviews on back instead of a blurb, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. I don't care what some person said about it. I want to know what the book's about. But when it's genre-fied, students will be more likely to pick it up because it's in the section they're interested in. Save the time of the reader. If it's not saving time, I mean, it's not saving time if they have to ask for help or recommendations or if they're, I mean, I've got a lot of kids that are too shy or stubborn to ask. Or, I mean, there's some genres I'm just not very knowledgeable about. And so it's not very helpful whenever they have all of those things happening and genre-fication solves a lot of that. The library is a growing organism. When you genre-fy, it's easy to tell what genres need growth and which ones need weeding. Also, new books on the shelf does not equal growth. If no one ever checks those new books out, does it even matter that you have them? So I feel like with all of those five laws, you kind of improve your library service by using genre-fication. Like I said, this may not work for everybody. It may just be too big of a beast for you to tackle. But I do encourage you to think about it because it has changed my library and my patrons for the better. And so I hope that you enjoyed this presentation. I hope you learned something and I hope that I've convinced maybe a few of you to consider genre-fication because I really do think that that is a direction that you may see happening a lot more often in the future. So that is all I have here in my resources in case you're curious. And then do I have any questions? Yes, we do. Actually, you can bring your slides back up if you want to just in case we need to go back and use them to answer any questions. Right. Thank you so much, Sarah. This is great. And as I said at the beginning, this is something definitely that is libraries are doing. And we do have quite a few questions, obviously libraries that are interested in doing it and some that have done it themselves have some comments. Okay. And actually, I'll jump around to one of these. A library did mention you talked about that the president of ASL had said not seen any library go back from doing it. We did one library who said they they the Republic Library who did do it a few years back and they labeled it with different colors. But because of space reasons, they had to reintegrate everything. But they still kept the colored tape and they have the guide up showing the colors, you know, so that people can still find the genre they like, even though it did get reintegrated. So they had to change for other reasons. But the genification worked and they still have it in their collection. So that's something. Yeah, that's great. And that's another way that you have to I mean, sometimes you have to adapt. And honestly, I might get to that point, because I only have so many shelves. And position two, but that's great that they still kept the genre vacation. So we have some questions. And I wasn't sure I can't remember if you had mentioned this already. So I wanted to know how many books are in your library when you first started the process, mind to figure out, you know, how long it took you to take do it, how much long might take this person to do their library. So how many books in total do you have in your collection? You know, that's really interesting, because that is one thing that I didn't actually do research on. That's something I probably should have. But I probably have about 15,000 books. Now, not all of them are fiction. So if you take out the nonfiction section, because I didn't, I didn't genre for those, they're kind of already done based on GUI. I probably have eight or 9000 books that I had to go in and individually genreify myself. And those are just the fiction part. Just the fiction. Yeah. Okay. Let's see here. I'm just reading through something to see. Okay. What about graphic novels? Do you have those and how did you deal with those? So I actually have graphic novels in a section all by themselves. But I don't really have a whole lot in that collection, either that's something that I'm working on building up. There were virtually none in here whenever I started five years ago. And so I've tried to really beef that section up. But I have them separated by fiction and nonfiction. But as far as genrefying those, I do not. However, I think that that would be a really great thing to do if you had enough that you needed to do that. And that's something that if I wanted to, it could be as simple as, like the library before said, just putting the colored sticker on there and providing the guide. I have not done that, but that's actually a really great idea that I did. Yeah, there's so many graphic novels that would fit into so many different genres now. And there are fiction and nonfiction of that as well. So I think they could totally meld into all the others. Yeah. So what about something, a book, that could fit into more than one genre, like romance and suspense? That one was really tough for me, because you have to put in one spot or another. You have to. And so what I did is I looked at Amazon and Goodreads and saw where people most often placed it because even on those two sites, a lot of times you have to pick one side or another. And if I have kids read that book and tell me, oh, that doesn't really fit there, I think it fits somewhere else. And I encourage them to do that because I'm not always right. I move it. And it's a really simple thing to do. But it is really like that was the hardest part for me in this whole thing was looking at a book and being like, oh, which one does it fit in better? So that's really kind of personal judgment. I mean, that's tough. And if someone asked, I'm sure you would know, oh, actually, if you're looking for that particular title or yes, I know that that's got multiple things in it that this is just where it happens to be. Or if you're looking for that type of romance, something that is suspenseful romance, I know of a particular book and here's where it happens to be. And like, one of the bigger, the bigger genres that happens a lot in is fantasy and magical realism. A lot of them have a lot of romance in them. There's a lot of books of all sorts of things. Yeah, it is hard. Yeah. Zona, here's an interesting question. What about the teachers and when they send the students did, did you work with them to inform them of how things are going to be changed and rearranged in the library? This particular library says the person says that they had a problem that the school is genre-fied and apparently the teachers did not know what had where things had been moved. And the students were sent to find particular books and were coming back with the ones the teacher didn't want them to come back with because they're going to the genre. And there was a lot of confusion to that. So how did you let your teachers know what was going on and how did that go? So I did talk with my teachers beforehand. In fact, for a whole year before I actually like got up the nerve to do it, I had talked with a lot of people at the school. I talked to my principal to make sure that he was okay with it just because, you know, you want to make sure that you are not going to do anything that's going to get you in trouble. But I talked with my principal, I talked with my teachers, I talked with a lot of students and I kind of had not an official one but like an advisory board to kind of run some questions across and situations and see what they thought about it. And all of my teachers were on board with this. In fact, I had a lot of teachers that really appreciated that it was easier for our students to find things. And I'm still available if they have any questions. And so is our catalog. Because in the catalog, the books have a location on them. And so if the student looks up the book, they can see it's in the romance section or it's in magical realism. So even if it's not immediately clear in your mind where it might be, there are a lot of resources to find it pretty easily. But yeah, I did talk with my staff and they, I mean, they were 100% behind it. And even now, like they really love it. So definitely a good tip. Make sure everyone knows what's happening, what's coming. And, you know, I have them invested in it by, like you said, having that sort of advisory board by reaching out to them and saying, hey, this is what we're doing. Do you have any input on it? Yeah. Yeah. Here's a question about your catalog. I'm actually using it from the staff side. When you generate a shelf list, does it list your books by genre location? Or how would that, how does that work? Like, it really depends. And it depends on your learning management system too, or not learning your library management system. But I can choose to have mine sorted by location. That's something that I have to go in and add or tell it to do specifically, but if I want it to, I definitely can.  So for me, like, not that big of a deal because I might have a couple hundred books in each section, but that might be a lot harder for, I mean, like I said, there's only 350 students at, you know, my school, so to have even one with 5,000 students. It's still considered kind of small, but it would be a lot harder for them to look at books the same way that I do. So I do think that depending on your library management system, you can do that. I know Destiny can, but I'm not sure about any others. Right. Sure. So switch over to the public library questions a couple here that we have to wrap up. And I know you're at school, but still, does do you know how does your public library in your area? Do you have one in your area? And does it do the same thing? Or are they still doing, doing Dewey or something else? And if, you know, if they are not, if they're, if our students did as I'm having, well, you would know if they're having trouble navigating the public library. But, you know, how is it going? You know, how does it compare to what's going on in your public library? Actually, I believe that I am the only library in my area that has a genre five library. Now I do every year we have professional development with other librarians. I do get a lot of questions about it from the surrounding libraries, but nobody has ever done it other than me. Our public library actually is pretty small too. We are really rural area just overall. And so our public library is not just a whole lot bigger than our library, but they have not done that yet either. So I know that our library is basically fiction and then nonfiction and nonfiction is separated by Dewey. Fiction is just kind of all lumped together because they're small like we are. So they haven't really separated by genre yet at all. Have you considered doing this with your nonfiction books that you've got the fictions done? My nonfiction, I mean, it's, it's separated by Dewey and I have labeled it in the same way that I've done my fiction section. Might not be able to see it, but like, for example, here is one of my labels for the section behind me. It's the education section. So, you know, everything from like the 370 section is there. And I have thought about including books like, let's say from the 00s, where it's like supernatural stuff in with the magical realism. I think that would be a really interesting way to do that. But I do think that I would run into a lot of problems with, well, where does this go? Or is this just really purely nonfiction? Yeah. I mean, I can see places that would in places where it would not. Yeah. I think one last question here. We do got to switch into our next session. But for a public library that is considering doing this, would you recommend just starting off with the children's section? Or even just children's as opposed to just all fiction or, right?  And so that's what you get used to. But kids, it's a little bit different. Like they haven't learned all of that yet. Like they've not been trained in how the dewey decimal system works. And so for them, it would probably be a lot easier for them to say, oh, I really like books about animals. And so if they could go to a section was just books about animals, I think that that would encourage a lot of those kids to pick books instead of kind of wandering around and hoping that they pick out a book that is about animals. Yeah. Definitely a good place to start. Yeah. All right. Okay. I think we'll have to wrap it up now. If anybody does have any questions, you can reach out to Sarah at her library about this and see if there are any other libraries in your area doing the same thing. So thank you so much for being with us this morning, Sarah.