First let me start off by sharing some information with you about this really cool blog I found. As you can see from the title of this post it is called “Technology is Loose in the Library” and the blog is written by Cathy Knuston who is the media specialist at Oak Hills Elementary. You can locate her blog at http://ohekidstech.blogspot.com/.
What she is doing in her library is truly amazing. She is very focused on using technology to highlight and enhance what the learning goals are for her students. She posts vibrant pictures of her students in action in the library and she goes into great detail explain how the different technologies are incorporated. This is an excellent resource for media specialists who want to integrate more technology into their lessons, plus it is just a great place to get lesson ideas. Now on to the main topic of this post, Genrification! Have you heard of this yet? If not, you may have been living under a rock for awhile. This is becoming more and more popular with each passing day in school libraries. Genrification is a system of organizing the library by genres instead of by the Dewey Decimal System. This means that instead of having alphabetical shelves of fiction books, you would have alphabetical Fantasy Fiction, Sports Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery Fiction, and many other genres. This could also mean, if you really get into it, throwing Dewey out completely and organizing your entire collection by genre and mixing fiction with nonfiction books. This would mean that in the basketball section you would have fiction books about basketball, nonfiction books about basketball and potentially biographies about famous basketball players. Are you intrigued or worried or scared about the prospects of genrification? Here are some blog post by some media specialists who have undertaken this project. The first one is the author of this blog Cathy Knuston. http://ohekidstech.blogspot.com/2015/05/hacking-genrification-oak-hills.html - So this post was written on May 26, 2015 which means she undertook this project last summer. She only genrified her fiction section of 4,000 books and based on the pictures she had plenty of help. She bought genre labels from DEMCO to label the books. The post explains the entire process and of course shows pictures of the different steps. She even includes a discussion on how she changes the records in the Destiny catalog. http://learninprogress.blogspot.com/2014/07/project-genre-fy-fiction-section.html - So this post was written on July 30, 2014. This is great article on genrifying the library includes information on how genres were picked and lots of detailed information on how to change the catalog records. It even has video instructions which I find the most useful since I am a visual learner! https://christyminton.wordpress.com/2014/05/04/genrefying-a-high-school-library-a-detailed-planning-document/ - This post was written on May 4, 2014. This focuses on a high school that undertook the genrification project for their library. I included this post because of the detail that went into writing this post. It is a great resource for anyone undertaking this project. https://expectmiraculous.com/2016/05/25/starting-the-genrefication-process-ditching-dewey/ - This last post is from one of the elementary media centers that was included for our SLM Analysis project. The post was written on May 25, 2016. The post does not have as many details as some of the others, but the pictures included are really great and I thought it would be nice to include someone local who has chosen to undertake this project. Now I would like to tell you where I am at with all of this. I feel like this is something I might need to do, but I am unsure as to what level I should take it to. I have bought the DEMCO genre stickers and I have started creating my lists in Destiny. My original thought was to keep everything in Dewey order and just label the books by genre. Students would then be trained to look for the sticker they are most interested in. It would definitely help with the shelving of the books if they stay in ABC order. But now after looking at these blog posts, I wonder if it will benefit the students much at all? It would definitely make things easier for the students if the books were grouped together by genre. But my next thought is does this hurt them down the road? I am pretty sure that the middle and high media centers in my area are not organized in this manner. So what do you think? Is this the future of media centers everywhere? Do you think this would help or hurt our students? I would greatly appreciate your input on the matter!
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