How to Genrify Your School Library

I want to start by saying this is how I did my genrefying. It might not be the way for everyone to do it, but it was what worked for me. Please use my actions as guidelines and what works best for you. To pull all the books and sort them took about five days (might have been a little less) with about 2500 books.

I did read Genrefication 101: A School Librarian's Quick Guide on How to Genrefy the Library before I started, but I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I needed to. A lot of what it had to say was common sense. The book can be found on Amazon if you’d like to read it, but it was a self-published book that didn’t really tell me anything that I didn’t find as I was looking up information.

This is what I ended up doing.

Like I said, I have about 2500 books (a few less than that) and that includes the new books I’ve added since I did the genrefying. I’d say I probably had about 2450 when I actually did this, give or take like twenty books.

This is my step by step guide to genrefying your collection:

I started by discussing the move with my district person. She’s been a great help as I work on my library. She said it was absolutely up to me what I did and to let her know if I needed any assistance.

The next thing I did was weed my fiction section. I had a lot of duplicates that weren’t circulating and some books that no longer had covers or were damaged.

I have Destiny as my library management program and access to Titlewave (if you don’t have Titlewave and do have Destiny, go ahead and make an account. It’s free and it’s a great help when you’re working on your collection). With this in mind, I called my Follett (Destiny) representative and requested a genre list. This should be free. If they mention a price, ask them why.

The list was emailed to me as an Excel spreadsheet so I went ahead and deleted the columns I didn’t need before sorting the books on the list by genre.

Now came the physical part, once we were done with school for the year, I started sorting the books. I had help from my mom and it took us about four days. My tables were covered in books, but it made it easier for me.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the Demco labels so I created my own. I'm working on creating a place for all the links to my different labels that I've created and I'll add that once I've finished.

I created my sublocations and scanned each barcode into an Excel sheet before batch uploading them to Destiny.

Once my books were sorted and placed on the shelves, we were able to label the books one at a time. This was the longest and most labor intensive part, but it’s easy to keep up now that it’s finished.

In addition to doing my fourth and fifth grade fiction (the larger chapter books), I also created a smaller section of what we call Quick Reads which are level two to three point five. Those have also been genrefied to assist with locating books.

Now that fiction and quick reads are done, I’m turning my attention to my Step Reads (first chapter books for students who are just beginning to read) and to my picture books.

Overall, it was quick and easy, just a couple of parts were tedious. It’s well worth it to see my students go right to the genre they want. I plan to create book talks and also book sheets to help my students learn what they like to read.