School Library - organising it

We’re working on organising a school library (G1-7).

So the easy part was separating the books into English / Chinese.

But then how do you sort the books? Alphabetically just doesn’t seem to work, it looks visually awful as there are so many sizes of kids books : from tiny paperbacks to huge hardbacks.

Would seem to me the best way is to split them further into size and organize them that way, but then that’s not a huge help if a teacher wanders in looking for, say, a Dr. Seuss. You’d have to look in 3 different places : small, medium and large. Perhaps just make them search on the PC beforehand …

Does this link below help? The Dewey decimal system a way of organizing school libraries that I remember from childhood. I didn’t know until now that it is apparently only for non-fiction

have heard of Dewey, but truth be told haven’t looked at it closely. I’ll see if it can work for this collection - thanks for the reminder.

How about by reading lexile?

Do you remember library card catalogs? That was Dewey

There’s definitely room for fiction in the 800’s, if it qualifies as literature:face_with_monocle:

This is very good and i also considered this a while back when sorting our kid’s books. I had trouble back then with evaluating some of those books though. Where do you draw the line, and how many lexiles do you have in an elementary school - 3 - easy, middle, hard?

But it’s an excellent idea, one which i’d forgotten.

Most now come with the lexile on the back cover. There’s a way to determine…that I don’t know. Let me get back to you on that.

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We had over 3000 books, not enough for a serious catalog… but enough to be a problem. I chose a simple system: file by first letter of the first word of the title. It worked well.

But like any catalogue system, it’s not enough if you can only remember the color or size of the book! You actually have to know the beginning of the name of the book. Then search for it.

Practically, it works. The library is small enough to allow personal searches, and big enough to be a problem otherwise. Dewey decimal would be a nightmare for us.

We considered thematic organisation… but IMO that makes books completely unfindable if you’re looking for a book with a different theme. Or a book has multiple themes.

Dunno.

We had a rather large library built into our school. That’s pretty much how we did it too. But it is labor intensive if you’re really looking to get kids to read and not simply entertain themselves with pretty pictures.

You need to know their reading levels. Then you need to easily direct them to suitable books to read. It’s easy to assess them and find their reading lexile. Then you know two things. Where they need help and what books they can read independently in order to reach reading goals. That’s how I do it now, in NY as a Union strong, certified ESL/ENL teacher, employed. It’s a far better way. But do what you want. Free country. :smoker:

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Spoken as truth - thanks. I need to carefully think where I’m going with this.

How many lexile groups would you suggest for a Taiwanese bi-lingual elementary school - is 3 sufficient? Apologies if this is covered in any links above, I’m pushed for time this week and just typing away ‘on the hoof’ here.

Firstly, assumed Lexile was a defined word. In fact, it’s a propiertory term (but that’s Ok).
I’ve done a quick search of a handful of books here - it’s manual work and the Lexile level is only appearing for about 50%. I think I’d be quicker just visually assigning them into 3 levels : Beginner, Learner, Advanced (for grades 1-6).

@jdsmith most interested in what software you’re using. The most suitable tool out there for a small collection appears to be BookCollector, and that would allow the school to graduate to a bigger / better library system if they choose to later on.

OpenBiblio seemed good but doesn’t appear to be supported anymore
http://obiblio.sourceforge.net/

I’m in a public school. All this magic has been done for us so it presents as science. :whistle: