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Two Days Without Dewey

posted by Great Western Dragon on Tuesday June 12, @09:38PM
from the Dropping-the-DDC dept. The Perry Branch of the Maricopa County Library District generated tonnes of buzz recently because they're not using the traditional Dewey Decimal System, opting instead to go with a "neighbourhood" set up more in tune with a bookstore.I spent two days working this new and innovative branch. If you got the interest in what's happening in a Deweyless branch, read on.Full disclosure: I work for MCLD. Opening a new branch library is not a thing to be taken lightly. After all, you're unleashing something onto the community, a time bomb of knowledge paid for by the taxes of a populace. With luck, the populace welcomes you with open arms, otherwise you get to hear people whine about taxes. So when you do this thing, you better be right.

But when you do something different, something no one ever attempted, you better make damn sure you know what you're doing. For instance, if you open a public library and forgo the use of the Dewey Decimal System, your instinct better be razor keen to the will of the patrons.

As to the will of the library community at large, screw that. Librarians, as a whole, are slow to change certain things. We readily adopt new technologies, and then vigourously apply them to centuries old methods of doing things. Whoever said that the more things change the more they stay the same must have done time in a library. We utilize all of our shiny new tech to automate a antiquated system. The DDC is over 130 years old, biased, and confusing to patrons. For those who think it isn't, try getting a patron to care about it. Melvil designed the system for librarians, and the system makes some sense to librarians.

To the patrons, it's anathema.

Or at least this is what the Maricopa County Library District banks on by opening the Perry Branch Library, a combination of a public and school library wholly abandoning the use of Dewey organization. I spent sixteen hours at Perry, working side by side with the staff during their opening days. My expertise covers Polaris ILS, the Class cash management software, public library circulation, and library technologies. I manage the Circ Department at the Southeast Regional Library, also a part of the Marciopa County system. We are library people of the highest order, pushing through day after day at the District's biggest and busiest branch. Because of this, my staff and I trained many of the people now working the Perry Branch. They too are library folk, our siblings.

The last two days marked their â€œsoft openingâ€ with a grand opening to be held later this month. Patron tensions ran high at Southeast Regional over the last few weeks. Many live out in that developing area of Gilbert, Arizona and the Perry Branch sits closer to a great number of our patrons. So it came as no shock to me that, a few minutes before opening the Deweyless library, a small group idled outside the great glass sliding doors, peering in and waiting.

Things remained on the task list even as branch manager Jennifer Miele unlocked the doors and welcomed our first patrons. Some shelves weren't yet fully organized. While all the sections stood completed, they weren't all in alphabetical order. The 3M SmartCheck and five bin sorter were offline due to connectivity problems. We let patrons know of these small issues as they entered. Their response was incredibly casual. Word got out long ago that the District arranged this library in a decidedly non-traditional sense. It's a library for the Chandler School District in the Town of Gilbert operated by Maricopa County. They expected strangeness.

Almost all the shelves in the library are shorter than the average library shelf. You can easily see from one end of the branch to the other. Laser printed signs designated areas of interest from Fiction to Mystery to Science to Art and beyond. The only thing detracting from a true bookstore atmosphere is the lack of a coffee shop. Patrons immediately began doing what MCLD Administrators assumed they would, they browsed. They looked everything over. We assisted them by locating items when they were unsure of a location, but the overall customer attitude was that this works.

A gentleman asked me for a book on dog breeds. When I escorted him over to the section dealing in Pets, he felt embarrassed. Not so because he didn't think to look there, but because he'd missed the sign. We had exactly what he was after. Other patrons mentioned that, despite the as yet un-alphabetized sections, they had no problems finding anything. Books on Astronomy were in the Science section. Patrons located their books about drawing on the Art shelves.

In short, they understood. They knew where things were by the subject signs taped to the shelves. (Better signs are on the way.) They happily made use of the self checkouts. By day two, the self check-in purred along and handled returns. We saw teens return the second day for the computers and the manga in the Teen Room. The main complaint: get the shelves alphabetized.

They're working on it.

Since the library also services the newly constructed Perry High School, they expect an explosion in circulation come the beginning of the school year. Believe it, bucko, they'll give Southeast Regional a run for the money. As it was, for a 28,000 square foot library, an opening day circulation of over 910 wasn't bad. Not bad at all especially when you consider that it was a soft opening without too much hoopla.

Patron response is positive and the staff is upbeat and ready to rock. As it stands, this will work. Trackbacks:

« | Google to cut back on how long it keeps search history »

Public Library News: Arizona library to be first to drop Dewey Decimal System 17 comments Interesting News From AZ where the new Gilbert library will be the first public library in the nation whose entire collection will be categorized without the Dewey Decimal Classification System, Maricopa County librarians say.

Instead, tens of thousands of books in the Perry Branch library will be shelved by topic, similar to the way bookstores arrange books. The demise of the century-old Dewey Decimal system is overdue, county librarians say: It's just too confusing for people to hunt down books using those long strings of numbers and letters. Dewey essentially arranges books by topic and assigns call numbers for each book.
Spotted @ The Stuff. County libraries defend Dewey Decimal System 4 comments A library in Arizona may have plans to drop the Dewey Decimal System, but Carroll County Public Library Director Lynn Wheeler says it would be chaos without the widely used classification system.
"I can't imagine the inefficiency of trying to run a library of this size without Dewey," said Wheeler. "It makes it much more manageable." This Week in LibraryBlogland: This Week in LibraryBlogLand (June 18, 2007) This Week in LibraryBlogLand
week ending June 17, 2007

..........

Laura Crossett (lis.dom) writes about doing some usability testing of her new library website.

Helene Blowers (LibraryBytes) on the MaintainIT Project which is "working with public libraries to identify best practices of technical support for public computers."

Michelle McLean (Connecting Librarian) adds a couple more points to the "librarians keeping up" conversation.

John Dupuis (Confessions of a Science Librarian) has posted the final installment of his two-year series, My Job in 10 Years.

Emily Clasper (Library Revolution) shows that sometimes, simple changes make all the difference.

Steve Bertrand (She Said/He Said) has an anecdote about keeping the customer satisfied and wonders, was what he did unethical?

Great Western Dragon (LISNews.com) reports on the first two days without Dewey at the Perry Branch of the Maricopa County Library District.

Librarienne notes that, as an organized profession, librarianship is relatively young.

Report: Taxpayer Return-on-Investment (ROI) in Pennsylvania Public Libraries.

Magazine article by Tim Coates: "Our Libraries: Where Has All the Cash Gone?" (Reader's Digest UK).

K. Matthew Dames (Copycense) writes about Fair use, copyright, and preemption.

Michael Gorman's "Web 2.0" postings (and responses), Part 1, Part 2. More comments (and links to yet more comments) here, here, here, here, and here.

BLOGGING

Anne Welsh (Catalogue & Index Blog) notes some pros and cons of aggregators.

Ivan Chew (Rambling Librarian on being in an audience that was asked not to blog an event.

THE LIGHTER SIDE

Library t-shirt of the week: Circ & Reference.

CONFERENCES AND PRESENTATIONS

Andrea Mercado (PLA Blog) explains how to blog for PLA.

Dan Chudnov (One Big Library) has advice to a slightly less experienced geek librarian on how to deal with post-conference reality letdown.

Special Libraries Association (June 3-6, 2007)
- Ruth Kneale posted her text and links of her talk, Spectacles: How Pop Culture Views Librarians.
- Notes from misseli (Confessions of a Mad Librarian)
- Notes from Jill Hurst-Wahl (Digitization 101)
- Notes from Christina Pikas (Christina's LIS Rant)

NASIG (May 31-June 3, 2007)
- Dan Chudnov (One Big Library) posted the slides from his talk.

10th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Uppsala, June 13-16, 2007)
- Notes from Neil Godfrey (Metalogger)

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This Week in LibraryBlogLand (TWiL) appears on lisnews.org every Monday.

Public Library News: Dewey? At This Library, They Don't The New York Times reports on the Perry Branch of the Maricopa County Library District in Arizona, which does not use the Dewey Decimal System for arranging their books. (Previously written about at LISnews here and here.) Two Days Without Dewey | Log in/Create an Account | Top | 14 comments | Search Discussion Threshold: The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Thanks!
(Score:1) by HollyB (6133) on Wednesday June 13, @12:51AM (#30337) Thanks so much for the report, GWD. I hope they have continued success. I think it's great! [ Reply to This ]
fluff
(Score:2) by GregS* (2813) <greg@shush.ws> on Wednesday June 13, @09:25AM (#30338)
( http://www.shush.ws/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 13, @04:43PM ) Other than a lot of hype you gave two examples of people finding a generic book on a general topic. You can whine about 'antiquated systems' and if thats the only kind of reference you have then you can get away with that. But since this is in fact a public/school library I sincerely hope that you are "library people of the highest order" (whatever that means) cause you're going to have to be damn near clairvoyant to do serious research in an alphabetized collection.
--
Greg McClay - greg@shush.ws - www.shush.ws
[ Reply to This ]
Libraries slow to change? BULL
(Score:1) by Anonymous Patron on Wednesday June 13, @09:48AM (#30340) We embraced automation years before other industries. We embraced data standards years before other industries. We just have the foresight to not throw out a classification system because we are in love with hanging out at Borders. Borders makes a great bookstore but a crappy library. I'd like to see a survey of patrons and staff in about six months. [ Reply to This ]
Re:Libraries slow to change? BULL
(Score:3, Insightful) by Great Western Dragon (53) on Wednesday June 13, @10:51AM (#30343)
( http://www.greatwesterndragon.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday June 19, @02:55PM ) I'm not going to take the time to defend my story. The fact that Greg disagrees with me is par for the course and I'd be surprised if he ever agreed with me.

However, I do have to back up this comment:

We embraced automation years before other industries. We embraced data standards years before other industries.

You're right. We did. And we still do. And yet we cling to the DDC, a system that's over 100 years old. We still use MARC, a system that's around 40 years old. And I believe that both of these systems still work... for librarians. And that'd be great... if we served only librarians.

But we don't or at least I don't. I work for the public. The public doesn't really understand DDC. They might know something about it, but 99% of them really don't get it. On a frequent basis, I get asked why religion is shelved under 200 and not under, say, religion. They don't get it. They don't understand Dewey. We do, sure, and we're here to help. But sometimes, they don't want that. They're searching for something personal (herpes information for instance) and don't really want to broadcast what they're after to anyone for any reason.

They don't understand DDC and they sure as hell don't get MARC.

Our technologies have evolved, sure. But we merely apply them to the automation of the same system we've used for over a century. And the fact is, it really is easier to find something in a bookstore. It's in the store's best interest to do that. They can't sell a book if people can't find it. Libraries, on the other hand, seem to go out of their way to make things hard to find, especially for those patrons who don't visit all the time.

Why don't they visit? Because it's intimidating, things are hard to find, and many don't want to ask. --
Arguments from authority are unacceptable. ~Carl Sagan [ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:Libraries slow to change? BULL
(Score:2) by GregS* (2813) <greg@shush.ws> on Wednesday June 13, @02:02PM (#30344)
( http://www.shush.ws/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 13, @04:43PM ) Hey, I'm fully behind laying out libraries like a bookstore if it helps patrons make better use of it but throwing out standard tools that help librarians be librarians *for no apparent reason* is dumb. This is not an either/or situation.
--
Greg McClay - greg@shush.ws - www.shush.ws
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:Libraries slow to change? BULL
(Score:1) by Anonymous Patron on Wednesday June 13, @07:29PM (#30348) It is not easier to find something in a bookstore. Online or in a physical store. If you believe that then you spend your life only finding items on display tables. The only argument you have made is better signage and marketing. The age of Dewey is irrelevant. The comment about the public doesn't know MARC is also irrelevant. Are you saying they can't search a catalog because they don't know how to format a search request in MARC? That's ignorant deadend reasoning which you know is false. By all means label in common terms and use signage to aid people. I will never see the logic of abandoning a system of organization for chaos?
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Size matters
(Score:1) by sv651 (5863) on Wednesday June 13, @10:21AM (#30341) One brief comment -- seems to me that the feasibility of a move like this depends in part on the size of the library in question: The bigger the library, the less likely the bookstore model is to work. [ Reply to This ]
"Living Room" organisation in Libraries
(Score:1) by Anonymous Patron on Wednesday June 13, @07:54PM (#30349) Hi, one of the public libraries I worked at in 1999 brought in the "Living Room" system which organised section of the libraries in related areas (in little alcoves, therefore "living rooms") such as "Countries," "Art" "Music" "People" etc, but within these broad sections the books were still shelved by Dewey - the idea being that people can locate an area of interest and possibly find good resources simply by browsing but anyone using the catalogue will still have a useful finding aid eg:

Counties: 993.01 NEW

It was slightly disconbobulating for patrons at the time but is still going strong 8 years later so draw your own conclusions - there are plenty of other fore-runners too. I can't imagine going without classification altogether until every book has been chipped and every patron giving an RFID scanner but we'll see... :)

Regards, Glen (librarianz@gmail.com) [ Reply to This ]
Re:"Living Room" organisation in Libraries
(Score:1) by johnzilla (3498) on Thursday June 14, @09:31AM (#30350) Working in nonprofits is great isn't it?!Tomorrow we could throw away all the books and people would still come in and as long as we spend all our money at the end of the year while presenting a friendly face to the few people who use us, we will be a successful nonprofit!Awesome! [ Reply to This | Parent ]
Eh.
(Score:2) by GAC (4335) on Thursday June 14, @07:41PM (#30354) I don't really care. I'm glad Harry didn't try this out on my branch when I was there, the first few weeks must be a mess to get used to. [ Reply to This ]
Re:Eh.
(Score:1) by Anonymous Patron on Saturday June 16, @05:57PM (#30365) I agree - let the county try whatever *new* technology they want it is still an awful place to work. If they want to get accolades and or respect from the library communtiy they ought to consider treating their employees a little better. [ Reply to This | Parent ]
Glad it's working; May you never get truly busy
(Score:1) by Anonymous Patron on Friday June 15, @12:04PM (#30358) I think the big thing that needs to be considered here is not only what the patrons are comfortable with, but also the size and space considerations of the library involved. It's nice that you were building from scratch (it sounds like?) and could afford the layout you wanted with all low shelves and big, clear signage. That's not really realistic for a good number of libraries.

The number of items involved should also be considered. Do you realize how long it sometimes takes staff in bookstores to help me find books I'm looking for? There's a reason my library uses Dewey for most items--so we can find them in a reasonable amount of time when we walk to the shelves. We're a large library. I don't think the patron really wants to look through the 222 different book titles we have on small businesses to find the one they had in mind. I know I don't want to.

There's nothing wrong with using Dewey and combining it with good signage and marketing I'm a little dismayed to see it pooh poohed simply because it's 100 years old. There's a reason it's survived 100 years-it's useful, and most members of the public can understand where a basic number comes, even if they don't know what the numbers mean.

Certainly, it's not the answer for all collections, and I wouldn't want people to refrain from trying new things. (We shelve our children's picture books in colored tape clumps and then by the first three letters of the author's last name. That's the closest to "order" they will ever get, and it generally works out pretty well.) I'm glad you like your new system, and I hope you find it keeps working as well as it has at first for you. All the same, with the number of times people are in a hurry when trying to find books and the size and layout restrictions of my library, I think we'll stick with Dewey for a bit. [ Reply to This ]
LOC system
(Score:1) by Anonymous Patron on Friday June 15, @12:14PM (#30359) Our library uses the Library of Congress system for most of our holdings and the older books do still go by the Dewey system. We also have a government document classification system for the government documents. I am wondering what the ratio is for libraries who use multiple systems, dewey only, LOC, etc. We are a university library so I do not believe we will ever switch to the Barnes and Noble way off arrangement. But truly, the B and N system cannot be a truly 'revolutionary' way of arrangement. It's just another system to learn. [ Reply to This ]
Wondering how it's going, a month out
(Score:1) by Zarah210 (6455) on Sunday July 15, @01:45AM (#30575) Just a library patron here, not a library professional of any kind. Our family does homeschool, though, (NOT religion-based) and in addition to having a card for our 5 county regional library system we pay $50 yearly for a card to a local municipal library that isn't a participant. This "kickin' it book store style" sounds awful and I'd drive to a different town to avoid it.

I also find it pretty grim that the rationale seems to be that people are too stupid to use libraries as they currently function. [ Reply to This ]

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Thanks!

fluff

Libraries slow to change? BULL

Re:Libraries slow to change? BULL

Re:Libraries slow to change? BULL

Re:Libraries slow to change? BULL

Size matters

"Living Room" organisation in Libraries

Re:"Living Room" organisation in Libraries

Eh.

Re:Eh.

Glad it's working; May you never get truly busy

LOC system

Wondering how it's going, a month out