Now THIS is exciting

At least for a librarian. I've been able to work out a solution to a problem that's been bugging me for the 19 years I've been here. Because we are a unit of the University Library, our cataloging (which is done for us) follows practices that are designed for an enormous research library. This is fine in most respects, with one major exception -- fiction. Research libraries don't do fiction. They do literature, which means that books are classified according to an author's geographic origins. Literary criticism, commentary, and the like are classified to sit on the shelves next to the works they describe. In our library, this means that fiction is scattered all over the 800s, like so:



Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now has an 813 call number since she's American, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has an 823 call number since she's British, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude has an 869 call number since he's Latin American. (Don't tell anyone, but over the years we've created all sorts of workarounds--like an uncataloged paperback collection--just to get some fiction in alphabetical order by author.)

So the good news is that, with the help of some very fine (and open-minded) people at the University Library, we've been given the go-ahead to start a genuine fiction section. So now the call numbers look like this:



In one streamlined order, we have Sweetblood by Pete Hautman (American) followed by The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett (British). And see that third item? Yes - it's a new graphic novel section! The Plot by Will Eisner has a GN prefix.

It feels good to finally catch up with all the other school libraries in America and be able to offer this bread-and-butter service.