Picture Book Shelving Arranged by Subject

Last year, we started to have overcrowding problems in our picture book area, making it harder for our students to browse easily.

Fortunately, our school's furniture budget hadn't been fully spent and I made a good case for how useful new shelving could be.  I asked for different shelving for our non-fiction area, which I'll talk about in another post.  I also asked for new browser bins for our picture book area, which would replace the display shelves and increase the amount of storage space for our picture books.

I decided to use the additional browser bins to implement an idea I'd been thinking about for a while.  I had read about a few libraries which had classified their picture books using subjects rather than the alphabet and I could see the benefits of doing this.  I was keen to enable our teachers to quickly find books related to particular areas they might find useful in their classrooms.  I could see some problems though, namely trying to get all the books to fit neatly into the subject areas when there is the potential for lots of overlaps.  I decided to use both systems - keeping the existing alphabetical shelving, and using the new browser bins to put a subject-based system into effect.

I decided to coincide the change with our stocktake so we had a few months to think about what subjects we wanted.  It also meant that we could add an extra day or two after our stocktake and do all the physical changes needed in both the picture book and non-fiction areas.

Once I had chosen the subject areas, I assigned them different coloured stickers to identify where the books would be shelved. We started by labelling new books with their appropriate stickers, then nearer to the stocktake date we moved on to labelling some of the existing books.  Once labelled we kept them in piles in my office. We changed the location on our library management system (Access-it) to 'Picture Books - (name of subject)'.  Then I realised that to find the location if you've searched for the book, you have to click on the book and then click again to go into the copy information. To make it easier I decided to change the book 'type' from just 'Picture Book' to 'Picture Book - (name of subject)'.  This means that you can see the location information as soon as you click on the book title. It also means that I can easily generate data relating to the circulation of these particular books.

After the stocktake was done we put all the picture books we wanted to reclassify into their subject areas. Once we had all the books in their piles, I realised that one of my proposed subjects, 'Concepts' didn't have very many books. Meanwhile, a second category, 'Nature and Technology', was very large and diverse. I decided to combine 'Concepts' with 'Maths' and split 'Nature and Technology' into two areas - 'Nature' and 'Science and Technology'. Fortunately, we hadn't labelled a lot of these books and were able to make the changes without too much effort.

Here are my final subject areas:

Maths & Concepts
Maths - includes counting, time, shapes
Concepts - includes colours, patterns, opposites, size, perspectives

English & History 
- includes reading, writing, ABCs, wars

Nature 
- includes animals, life cycles, environment

Science & Technology 
- includes inventing, internet safety, engineering

Wordless Picture Books

Maori Culture & Language 
- includes bilingual

Feelings & Life Issues 
- includes mindfulness

Fairy Tales & Fractured Fairy Tales

Diverse Books 
- includes different cultures, special needs, different types of families


We already had a bay for Maori language books. I decided to expand this to include books in English that dealt with Maori culture as I felt it would be useful for teachers to easily access these.

I know 'Wordless Picture Books' is not really a subject, but I wanted teachers to be able to easily find these books. I ran a session for my Teachers' Reading Group on how to use them earlier on in 2019. Here are my slides. I'm hoping to run a session on using Fractured Fairy Tales later on this year.

Esther made temporary signage for each area. I want to get some professionally printed along with our new non-fiction signs.

We only had a week left of school after the stocktake and shelving changes were made so I delayed formally introducing the teachers to the new system. I have a slot during one of the Teacher Only days this week when I will do this.

When we opened the library again at lunchtimes we realised that the smallest children might have difficulty with the height of the new browser bins. I decided to purchase a small step for them to use. There wasn't a lot of choice, a lot of the steps I found were actually to help children reach the toilet and were quite flimsy and not likely to stand up to frequent use. I ended up buying an aerobic step, so I've been joking that I can use it at lunchtime if I need some exercise.

We've been opening the library for one afternoon a week during the holidays, and it's been lovely to see parents making use of the new sections. We had one parent come up and ask if we had any books about maths and we were able to direct her to the 'Maths and Concepts' section. I've also had enquiries in the past about whether we have books relating to autism, and these can now be easily found in the 'Diverse Books' section. I hope that all our new sections will be helpful to our parents and teachers.

Update: Yesterday I spoke to our teachers and talked about the new subject areas in our picture book area.  As I spoke the teachers started spontaneously clapping!  I think it's fair to say that they are very happy with the changes :)

2022 Update - We've done away with the A-Z surname shelving altogether!  Find out more here.