Our library now looks a lot more like a bookstore than a traditional library. If you like adventure books, you can come in to the library, walk to the adventure shelves and find all of our adventure books in the same place. They are still in alphabetical order by the author’s last name, like a regular library, but they are also shelved by genre.  I decided to divide our fiction into 9 sections:
Sci-Fi, Sports, Fairy Tales, Classics, Mystery, Adventure, Historical Fiction, Humor and Graphic Novels.  It took forty hours (!!!!) but it’s done!  Then I tried it out Tuesday with our fifth and sixth graders.  The first thing they said when they came to library was “Mrs. Kalbfleisch, we need mystery books for our books reports.”  I was thrilled to see how easy it was for them to go to the mystery section rather than search the shelves or the Follett Destiny search engine!  The bookstore format worked perfectly!  I put a sticker on all the fiction books, grouped the genres into piles and reshelved them in their new genre neighbhood.