Organization and Guiding Principles

It is important to have libraries organized so that people can easily locate resources when they are needed. Like many other elementary school teacher librarians, I am most familiar with the Dewey Decimal Classification System as a method in which to arrange the libraries resources. I find it to be user-friendly and easy to understand with its seven underlying principles: decimal division; classification by discipline; hierarchy; mnemonics; literary warrant; enumeration and relative location. It is, therefore, no wonder that the Dewey Decimal Classification System, as mentioned by Intner and Weihs (2007) in Standard Cataloguing For School and Public Libraries, “is said to be the world’s most popular classification” (p. 165).

However, over the years, I have noticed that even though school libraries are using the same system (DDC), as their guiding principles of classification, the placement of resources within each of these libraries was not necessarily uniform. It seems that the word ‘organized’ can mean different things to different people. For example, some libraries have created separate spaces for videos, soft cover book (fiction and non-fiction). Personally, I like to have a separate section for fiction books that are holiday related so that I don’t have to be constantly pulling them for teachers (and students). Also, in one school they did their home reading from the library. Therefore, I kept the levelled home reading (early reader) books in a separate place as well. Intner and Weihs (2007) state that “Applying an organizing attribute does not guarantee an arrangement is useful. The resulting arrangement must meet the needs and expectations of the public for whom it is intended” (p. 151). While the users of each library vary, so too do the choices made by teacher librarians. The organization of resources requires that we must keep our particular users in mind.