Hemingway's Desk From Key West Daily Thoughts October 1, 2009
Today is another quiet smooth day. I handed in my monthly report today, did a little weeding, and made sure the displays were updated.
My colleagues also redid most of the displays today with banned books week book displays. I was not part of this set of planning. There was a display on censorship, a display on teen banned books, and a display of adult banned books in the front entranceway. It was very thematic.
I am still reading The Cost of Bad Behavior. The book is describing the cost of incivility to customer service right now. It describes how incivility can drive away customers and even affect stock prices in companies. A rude conference call with stock analysts does not lead to good corporate performance.
There is a very interesting article on Book Industry Standard and Classification versus Dewey classification for libraries. I have never seen BISAC in a library, but I have visited many bookstores with this classification scheme. It is far better for browsability, but it can fail when looking for very specific books. Dewey is much more granular than BISAC. I really liked the idea of partial categories for books using BISAC and individual dewey labels for specificity.
I am a big fan of merchandising for the purpose of increasing circulation. The issue with breaking the collection into smaller categories is that there are many more places to look for a book. Also there is a lot more work in processing materials. At the same time, it creates very nice browsable categories and increases circulation. We merchandise our displays; pulling displays for career books, graphic novels, and other categories. Also our "new arrivals" section is merchandised into romance, science fiction, mystery, audiobooks, dvds, and fiction books.
Building separate special collections is a big task. We do have separate sections for African American fiction, mystery, audiobooks, job information center books, short stories, and romance paperbacks. There is also a separate Local History room, law collection, multicultural reference collection, reference collection, and periodicals collection.
I enjoyed reading the article quite a bit. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6698264.html
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