Our Genrefication Journey

This guest blog is written by Carole Gardiner, an Accessit Library customer, SLANZA life member, and Head of Library at John McGlashan College in Dunedin, New Zealand.

What is genrefication? And, why would you genrefy your school library?

Initially I was not a fan of the idea of genrefying. My fiction collection at that time wasn’t huge, and my students seemed to be able to find the kinds of books they wanted without too much trouble. I had a “quick grab” display of popular titles for those that wanted a book without having to wade through too many options, I knew my collection well and could easily point them to books that sounded like the kind of thing they would enjoy, and several read-alike posters around the library gave them suggestions of books similar to their favourites. All of this was working well. Most of all, I liked the idea of the serendipitous discovery that happens when browsing the shelves. I was wary of students getting stuck in one particular genre and not finding the multitude of other books in other genres that might have the kind of characters, writing styles, and themes they liked .

The other key factor influencing my decision not to genrefy concerned spine labels. I dislike the idea of multiple labels that run up the spine, obscuring the author, title, and sometimes artwork that the publisher has very consciously selected to make the book attractive and appealing to readers. Examples of genrefied libraries that I had seen up to that point usually involved adding an extra sticker with a genre icon, above the existing classification label. Sometimes there might be other stickers too, to indicate short stories, senior fiction, or a New Zealand author. It all just felt a bit messy and complicated for students to navigate. So while I did not entirely rule out the idea, at that time genrefication was not something I was considering.

At the beginning of 2024, I was appointed library manager at John McGlashan College, a state integrated year 7 to 13 boys’ school. The library’s fiction collection was split into two alphabetical sequences: Junior Fiction (indicated by a black dot on the spine) and Fiction, which included YA and adult titles. I noticed many students would immediately go to the same shelves each time they had to find a book, while a fairly large proportion would wander the shelves aimlessly as if they had no idea where to begin. I was also not incredibly familiar with the collection at this point, so making fiction recommendations when a student said they were interested in sport, for example, could be tricky.

Genrefication was always lurking in the back of my mind, but it was not until I watched a recorded Accessit webinar on the topic at the end of 2024 that I began to reconsider. Two guest school librarians spoke about their experiences genrefying their libraries, and how in their experience the pros definitely outweighed the cons. The most compelling reason they gave, which ultimately changed my mind and got me off the fence, was that students found it easier to find books they wanted to read. Given the problems I’d already identified with students having difficulties finding books to interest them, I decided I needed to give genrefying a go.

I very quickly landed on some clear goals. Firstly, our genrefied fiction needed to be easy to navigate. I didn’t want to make finding a book tricky and complicated. To this end, I was also mindful of how genres would look in our Accessit Web App [OPAC] and how our students might need to adjust their current search behaviours. And secondly, I knew that I didn’t want to add lots of extra stickers to the book spines.

With these goals in mind, at the beginning of 2025 I started gathering information to help me decide how genrefication would look in our library. Blog posts and articles by librarians such as Kelsey Bogan and Madison Dearnaley gave me some good ideas. Then a conversation with our local National Library Services to Schools Facilitator, Maxine Ramsay, sparked a trip to Invercargill to visit five school libraries who had genrefied their libraries several years earlier.

Visiting these school libraries was some of the best professional development I have ever undertaken, and I am incredibly grateful to Maxine for organising this for me. The librarians were all very generous with their time and happily shared what worked for them. I came away with a load of photos, lots of ideas for labels and signage, and an awareness of potential pitfalls. Each library I visited had done things slightly differently, so I was able to pick out the things that appealed to me and that I thought would work for our students.

The first thing on my genrefying to-do list was weeding. After watching the excellent Big Picture: Taking a Bird’s Eye View of Your Catalogue webinar in the Accessit customer portal, I downloaded the relevant Quick Reports and followed the instructions in the webinar to print off lists of potential candidates for weeding. These reports identified books purchased in the last 10 years which had received heavy use and could need replacing, as well as those which had been used very little or not at all. It was then a matter of checking these titles on the shelves and making decisions about retaining, removing, or replacing them. Some seldom used titles did get a temporary reprieve if I felt they might be issued more often once they were shelved by genre and perhaps easier to find.

As the weeding progressed, I mulled over which genres might work best for our library. The final list contained 12 genres (Action, Classics, Dystopia, Fantasy, Historical, Horror, Humour, Life, Science Fiction, Sport, Suspense, and War). I also decided to merge our junior and YA/adult fiction so that there would be a single area for each genre.

My next task was to look at how I wanted to label our books to display their genres. After my school library visits and online research, I had eventually decided not to use icon stickers to identify each genre. I quite liked the way some schools using Accessit had assigned an icon to each of their genres and created a separate collection for each genre so that in the web app the genre icon would be prominently displayed in search results. However, I hadn’t been able to find commercially available genre stickers that I liked or that adequately covered all of our 12 genres. I did consider creating my own stickers, but finding icons that were free to use, clear and unambiguous, and also looked good proved to be challenging! I didn’t want to have to use posters to explain which genre each icon represented.

Instead, I decided to allocate a unique colour to each genre which could be used consistently on spine labels and signage. I knew that Accessit’s advanced label templates allowed colours to be added using RGB codes, so I started to play around with some label formats. Once I had a template that I liked, I replicated it for each genre, adding the relevant colour as the background for the genre field. I also decided to include the number in the series (if applicable) beneath the classification, to make it easier for students to identify reading order when browsing the shelves. We were now ready to start relabelling all our fiction!

Books remained on the shelves in their normal alphabetical sequences while we carried out the relabelling so the library could continue to function as usual. Most books were simple to classify into a genre, but some were very tricky! We often resorted to Goodreads or other libraries’ catalogues to see if we could get a consensus. One of the things Kirsty Adam at James Hargest College said during my visit to her school library was really helpful. When faced with a tricky decision she would ask herself, “If someone wanted a funny book and found this book in the Humour section, would they be disappointed?” When assigning genres, we came back to this question format rather often! As expected, the relabelling process took most of a term and included checking and/or updating the genre field in the catalogue records as we went.

By the end of Term 3, we were ready to finally move the books into their genres on the shelves. This was a bit like trying to solve a giant 3-D jigsaw puzzle. We began by moving the largest genre and then fitted the smaller ones around that. Moving or adding additional shelving was not an option, so we had to make things fit without splitting genres across the sets of shelving too much.

Signage was the next priority. I used Canva to create colour coded signs to go along the front of each shelf, which included the genre, te reo Māori translation, and a three or four word description. We printed and laminated these, attaching them to the shelves using magnetic tape so that they can be moved easily if needed. I repurposed our acrylic alphabet dividers by attaching colour coded signs to them, and also made directional signs for the end of each set of shelving to show which genres were shelved on which side .

The last step was to update our Accessit catalogue records. Accessit has a handy genrefying tool in the cataloguing module that can append classification suffixes/prefixes and update genre and location fields all in one go. However, all we needed to do was update the override location for each item, so I took a different approach. We used our remote barcode scanners to scan the books on the shelves, one genre at a time. The barcodes were saved into a text file and then imported into Accessit’s Quick Scan. I then updated the override location with the appropriate genre using the Replace function. This method also had the benefit of allowing us to import the saved scanned barcode text files into our stocktake too – the ultimate in library multitasking!

As books still out on loan are returned to the library, we will update their catalogue records and print off new labels as needed. There are bound to be a few wrinkles to iron out, but overall, the process has been straightforward.

Initial feedback from our students has been positive. They like the new layout, and they like how the new labels are clear and easy to use. I am happy that anyone heading to their usual go-to place in the shelves will now see some new books, and both my library assistant and I are now much more familiar with the fiction collection after inspecting each book to assign a genre. I have my fingers crossed that we will now see an increase in issue statistics when compared to previous years and that more students will be able to find a good book quickly and easily.