genre | the barefoot librarian

It finally happened. We genrefied the fiction section of our Elementary Library.

Our Fiction section caters for strong readers, mainly 4th and 5th grade students, who are ready to move on from the chapter books they’ve been reading in our Young Reader section where they’ve climbed up the reading ladder between Picture Books and Novels.

As I spent more time curating the collection, weeding and considering, here are some things I learned about the library collection I’ve helped build for 12 years:

Our Fiction section is pretty mature, not only are lots of our books hundreds of pages long, but their content also had a lot of books that we also have in our Secondary Library. I know there’s always overlap, but it’s made me think about my bias. I started out as a High School English teacher, then Middle School English, then I taught 5th grade for 7 years before becoming a qualified teacher librarian in 2012. Perhaps I’ve overestimated the maturity of our young people? It’s something I’ll continue to review.
In my desire to build a truly diverse collection, one that represents the lives of our students, one that continues to move the collection forward from being written by predominantly white American males, I seem to have perhaps over-compensated and now have MANY female authors. I haven’t inventoried based on gender, but I am cognisant that in the last couple of years, the majority of new books I’ve purchased for this age group were written by females. Perhaps because they’re amazing? Perhaps because I’m female? No matter the reason, it’s something I’m more aware of after the genrification process.
We have WAY more fantasy books than I’d realised. I would have thought the collection was 1st-realistic fiction, 2nd-historical fiction (again, is that because these are my two favourite genres, the ones I know best?) However, in order of size, it went fantasy, then realistic fiction, then funny, with historical fiction and science fiction having similar amounts next.
Adventure is hard. It just seemed there were so many better options to put ‘adventure’ stories in; mystery adventures, fantasy adventures, realistic adventures. It’s like I could go through the whole collection again now that I’ve genrefied, and genrify again!
Novels in verse is probably the area I’ve second guessed the most; I mean, it’s a hybrid right, of poetry and prose, but it’s not REALLY a genre, I think of it more as a style of writing. All the books withIN novels in verse, HAVE a more dominant genre; Jamie Sumner’s “Deep Water” is realistic fiction, Black Star by Kwame Alexander is historical fiction, Worse Things by Sally Murphy-sports fiction, and on it goes.
Oh, and sports fiction, I didn’t include that as a genre; we just didn’t have so many, it’s not something our community read a lot of. We also didn’t include animal fiction, although it’s another section we could have included. When we thought about it, we just always found that those animal fiction books were also more well known in a different genre, often fantasy.
Our smallest collections were classics, scary and those novels in verse, which we kept, as it’s true that once students discover novels in verse, they really latch onto that format, enough that ultimately, we’re keeping them for now.

So. Next step. Signage. We’re experimenting with styles, fonts, colours, locations and all that fun stuff. We’d replaced our fiction signs fairly recently, they have the letters of the alphabet on them. However I’m happy to say we can repurpose these by simply turning the signs around, a win.