Merchandising

Merchandising

Our library is not particulary merchandised. Merchandising is breaking books into lots of small categories like in a bookstore. My boss resists the idea of merchandising the collection. He wants everything to be either alphabetical or by dewey number for the most part. It is very old fashioned. There are a few merchanised collections in my area, the job information center, the multicultural collection, the business reference, the mystery collection, the young adult collection, and the law collection.

The problem with merchandising is that it requires you to have a lot of people to put the books away. There are a lot more categories to put the books in and it is easier to misplace books as well.

The other problem which often happens is that people ask to have books categorized by race, ethnicity, or religion. Where are all the clean books? Where are all the black books? Where are all the hispanic books? Why aren't all the christian books separated from the regular collection? So far, we have partially avoided the hot button issue of separating books out by race, religions, politics, or ethnicity. We have a "multicultural collection" in reference.

We have not separated the urban fiction from the rest of the fiction collection. This is mostly black ghetto writing. There is some hispanic urban fiction, but not much. It is its own genre of writing. This might be a good category to "merchandise" because it is so popular here.

It is much easier to find and display books when they are merchandised. It also puts together similar materials. I am going to ask to have all the graphic novels merchandised so they are easier to find and manage.

I also think having a separate merchandised computer book collection would be better as well. There are computer books in several locations, Quicken is in the accounting section, Wordperfect is with the keyboarding books, digital photography is with photography, upgrading PC's is with the engineering books. It would probably work better if they computer books were merchandised.

Our collection really needs to be reorganized. I can see where we could do a lot more towards having some more categories of books. We would have to relabel the books, but that really would not be a problem.