Need some help/advice

Hello everyone,

First a short interdiction. I'm the Volunteer in charge of a small special collections library that deals solely in books that ether have LGBTQ content or are written by LGBTQ authors. All of the books are received by donation as we have very little funding for buying books, and we are based out of the LGBTQ community center. We currently have over 10,000 books spanning both non-fiction and fiction. At the moment non-fiction is organized by LOC# and fiction is only sorted by gender, e.x. books about or written by gay men are in one section and similarly for lesbian/women books.

Now on to the actual reason for this post. 1) I want to further sort the fiction by genre. Do you think this is a good idea? and 2) Does any one know how I would go about contacting a Magazine company to see if they would donate a subscription to our library?

Thanks in advance,
Drew

If you sort by anything other than author, you're going to eventually get into some paradoxes (works by the same author in different places, people arguing whether Point of Dreams is a mystery or a fantasy novel, yada, yada. You've probably already run into that by the gender sort. For instance, where is Shadow Man?

LT can help with a lot of that, because you can put the location in the record, so even if people argue whether it should be in a particular place, at least they can find it. On the other hand, if you file everything under author and then title, it's easy to file and you can use LT to track genres and genders.

So do people spend a lot of time browsing the shelves or do they look stuff up on LT first and then go to the shelf? Do you have enough staff to do the initial sort and keep it properly sorted after than? Those are the kind of questions I'd ask to figure out which system was best for my library.

Most magazines print their address within the first or last couple of pages and that is your first port of call for contact; if the publication is a large one it's a good idea to phone first to check the name of the correct person. If you can't find an address there, invest in a copy of whatever is the American version of the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, which has contact details for pretty much any publication you might want to check out. Alternatively you should be able to find most of the addresses on the internet.

As for cataloguing by genre, I'm sure that's something a lot of us have tried to do in our own personal libraries and it's almost always a failure, largely because genres have a tendency to overlap. In fact, it takes a pretty one-dimensional novel to be only about love/suspense/gay relationships/sci-fi etc. After all, how many stories (factual or fictional) can you think of that cover only one topic? It can occasionally happen in a short story but even then it would have to be a pretty basic example.

thanks for the info about the magazines, the reason why i want to do a genre sorting is because most people come in look at our large wall of books and ether ask for a specific type of book or walk out and never come back because they can't find the type of book they want. and as to LT our collection is over 10,000 volumes and unfortunately most of our volunteers don't do any thing but sit in front of the computer and surf the web when not checking out books for people. One other volunteer and I are the only ones that put new books in the system and sort the donations :( so at this moment I'm not expecting us to catalog with LT.

Hmm. This could lead to a damned if you don't (people walk out because the books aren't separated) and damned if you do (people walk about because, although the books are separated, they're too hard to shelve so no one can find anything).

You might want to consider reducing the size of the library to something small enough for two people to handle.

Cross-referencing is the answer but it's going to take a lot of work. I guess you're going to need more volunteers. Maybe there is something a bit intimidatig about the way your books are displayed? After all, most other libraries don't seem to have the problem of people walking out because the books aren't arranged by genre. When you talk about a 'large wall of books', if that's the way it really looks to your patrons then maybe just splitting that large wall into several smaller sections might help. Just a thought.

from what I've heard they used to be split in to much small sections but it caused the problem of there being no room in the front half of the library. right now with the fiction books being on ether wall we have room for a small reading/lounge section and the library has a vary home library feel but at the cost of having all of our fiction books being a "wall of books" >_

Our collection is sorted ( and shelved into smaller collections. Our size is similar to yours and unless we handled it this way we'd never be able to find anything. Some collections are separated by gender- others are not simply because that particular collection is too small.