Reflecting Forward
with Jen Legatt

It took a lot of work to designate which books belonged in which genre before I started at Jackson Middle School. I did almost of the genre work from a shelf list, exported from Destiny. Since I was new, I didn’t even have access to the catalog! But, I made it work. I spent the summer examining the data, with support from both Mackin and Follett to help me narrow down possible genres.

After the overwhelming task of unpacking the books, which I will cover later, I started with the sports books with the very first genre labels. This was a small section. They were easily designated and were well labeled in the previous labeling work on the books.

These labels were ones that I knew were important. Kids who want to read sports books want to read specific topics: football, baseball, soccer. The labels for this genre not only are colored for the genre. They have the world Sports. But, unlike other genres… the image on the label matches the sport in the book! This has been a very popular feature in the Jackson Middle School Library.

Three years in, we did have to redo these labels. The first reason: the color ended up too close to Supernatural and SciFi when using different printers. But, more importantly, we used spine label covers when placing the original labels. Sadly, they started peeling off after just two years! We’ve switched to simply using book tape most of the time to cover our spine tag and genre label.

This will give you an idea of what most of the labels for the Sports section looked like.

My question to you:

What section(s) would you consider creating more specific spine tags to designate the theme of the book? What benefits would you see for this? What negatives or setbacks might there be to this project?