Info 202 Fall 2011

The 2 articles— this
and that—
when combined, offers a new way to organize materials in a library.

Both techniques work towards making library more
user-friendly (the user here being the final customer and not the librarian or
the staff).

Article 1:

Washington Public Library was proposed a new system by
Redhage to arrange materials. This system is based on organizing materials in
similar categories or neighborhoods rather than sorting them by the Dewey
Decimal System. The new system is known as C3 — Customer Centered Classification.
It gives the user a “bookstore feeling”. The salient feature of this new system
is that the organization is library-specific. There is no standard way to categorize
books across libraries. Redhage proposes to have a combination of C3 as well as
Dewey Decimal System so that even if a book is referred from a catalogue, it
can be found using the Dewey Decimal Number. The new shelves in library will
provide flexibility to arrange related materials (books, magazines and
audiovisual items) in the same area.

Article 2:

East Central College’s library will organize its materials in a different
way. Previously, certain items, such as reference materials, oversized books,
audiovisual items (DVDs and books on CDs) and subject-specific periodicals were
spread out in their own area of the library. Now, those items can be found
mixed among books and other items related to a certain subject. “For example,
if a nursing student wants to find materials, they can go to that area
(nursing) and find general nursing books, reference books, DVDs or CD books and
professional nursing journals all in one place”. Oversized books on art, which
used to be placed in a separate section, will now be located with other art
books. This way, students can come across journals, newspapers etc. which they
didn’t know before existed. A letter/number combination system will be used, as
previously, to identify each item in the library.

The combination of these 2 systems will change the way a customer feels
about a library; it will become more like a digital library where everything on
a particular topic can be found together. The main advantage of this is that
customers can themselves locate books and related materials, and browse through
them without staff’s help, and thus come across new materials.