 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week, and it is posted to our website later in the day. I'll show you the end of today's show where you can see what you'll be able to see today's archives and any of our other previous archives. Both the live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who you think may be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. As the Nebraska Library Commission, we are the state agency for all libraries in the state of Nebraska, so we have shows on all sorts of topics and for all types of libraries. So you will find things for public, academic, K-12 schools, museums, correctional facilities. If it's a library or has library in it, you'll probably find something in our archives of interest to you, either in our archives or in our upcoming shows. We do do a mixture of types of sessions here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos of services or products, anything that we think may be of interest to libraries. Sometimes we do do sessions with the Nebraska Library Commission staff presenting for us on things that are either local to us or services or programs that we're offering here in Nebraska for our Nebraska libraries, but we also bring in guest speakers sometimes, and that's what we have this morning. On the line with us is Teresa Stannard. Good morning, Teresa. Good morning. Morning. And she is the director, library director at the Parchment Michigan Community Library. And she is going to talk to us this morning about ditching Dewey. Yay. Well, depends on your point of view, our opinion. I know this is the thing that many libraries are investigating and she's going to talk about how they did it in their library and the process of that. This is a session as I mentioned to you as well that once a year we do an annual online conference of an all day thing, all day event like this one, but for eight hours called Big Talk from Small Libraries. And this was one of the presentations submitted to that. This year we had too many presentations to fill a day. So some of them what we are showing here on our Encompass Live show. And I'm glad to hear that you were able to join us this time, Teresa, that we didn't know that we could share your information. Oh, my pleasure. Even though we ran out of space in our one day, someday maybe Big Talk will end up being a two day event. We'll see if I can handle that myself. But for today we have you on the show. So I'll just hand it over to you to take it away and tell us about what you did at your library with Dewey. Fantastic. Hi everybody. As she said, I'm Teresa Stannard and I've been the director of the Parchment Library since 2001. And this is the story of how we converted our nonfiction collection from the Dewey Decimal to the BISAC classification system and live to tell about it. And phrasing it that way, you might expect, and it's true that there were a couple of days when we thought we might not. Understandable, yes. All right, let's see. There we go. Here's the table of contents, so to speak, for today's session. I will say that this is the first presentation that I've done as a webinar, as opposed to an in-person session. And I do miss being able to see all your faces and hear your voices. But though we can't hear each other, I'm really glad you're here with me today. Do feel free to ask questions throughout, and I've left time at the end for more questions at the end of the presentation. All right, there we are. Parchment is a small town just north of Kalamazoo. Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo in Southwest Lower Michigan. If you ask a stranger where they're from and they instantly raise their hand to use as a map, they are from Michigan. We do it all the time. We do it to strangers. We do it to one another. It's what we do in Michigan. If they raise their right hand and hold it vertically, they're from the lower peninsula. If they raise their left hand and hold it horizontally, they're from the upper peninsula. And you can see the happy fellow there on the right is pointing to Kalamazoo. So now you know exactly where we are in the state of Michigan. And a quick, very brief, 20 second history of the city of Parchment. In 1909, a paper mill that specialized in, you guessed it, Parchment Paper, opened up on the Kalamazoo River here. And the roads, of course, if you can call them roads at that time from Kalamazoo to this location, were essentially mud tracks. And the workers had a terrible time getting to the mill. In fact, many of them pitched tents and lived in tents. And so the mill owner, Jacob Kindleberger, started building homes for the workers and their families. And that is how the city of Parchment began. However, Jacob wanted to build not only a state of the art paper mill, he also wanted to build a community city, I mean a community city, a model city. And he did that. He added a 60 acre park, which is right behind the library. It's absolutely gorgeous. Right next to the library, though it no longer exists, was a huge community Hall. And in that, there was a full theater. There was a dining hall. There was an exercise room. There was a community kitchen and a community workshop, a wood shop that people could come and do projects in. So That means that Parchment has always been quite a lovely place to live and to raise a family in the mill, unfortunately, closed in 2000 and took with it. Most of our tax base and we have been figuring things out since then, but Parchment continues to survive and thrive. And I'm happy to say we have a lot of strong community to support for the library. Serve a population of just under 10,000 in our library district, of which about 1800 are in the square mile Parchment City limits. Our print collection is just about 35,000 volumes of which now about 8200 are adult nonfiction. And we have a staff of 14, most of whom are part time. So why did we decide to put ourselves through this? It started when we noticed more and more and more of our younger patrons, meaning teens and then folks in their 20s also, who had no idea what the Dewey Decimal System was and we found out that they had stopped teaching it in schools quite some time ago. And after we had so many people come up saying, I don't get these numbers. How am I supposed to find this thing? We started talking about what we could do to help that situation. Of course, we started with what we all do, which is put the extra signage up to explain and make it clear what's what, and it helped a little bit. It really wasn't the answer. And at the same time, we noticed our nonfiction circulation figures had the dwindles. And when we compared each month to the month from the year before, we realized that we were just drifting downward all the time, and we talked about how could we turn that around. So we visited quite a few libraries in southwest lower Michigan, and we found two that had switched to word-based classification. One of them was the Helen Warner Branch in Battle Creek, and they had invented their own. It's very similar to BISAC, but it's their own system. And then the Kent District Library in the Grand Rapids area had a branch that had used BISAC as the framework and had edited that. And we kicked it around and did some test runs, and we decided that we just didn't have the manpower to create our own system from scratch. And what the Helen Warner Branch had done really wasn't working for us, so we decided to go with BISAC and make edits as necessary. All right, now that we decided that we were going to do this thing, we had to figure out how to do it. And as I said, of course, we're going to be using the BISAC headings as our framework, and BISAC stands for Book Industry Subject and Category Codes. The second tool that we came up with that was a lifesaver is we created a shared document. We used Google Docs. You can use whatever works for you. We used Google Docs. And we created our master list, and this was our working tool as we were building our subject headings list, and all the team members could create comments and questions. It was very much how we talked to one another on a daily basis, and it proved invaluable. And now that everything is said and done, this is the list that we use as our reference list as we're cataloging books, and we continue to edit it as needed. I'm sure most of you who use Dewey have a copy of the DDC, that four-volume set, sitting around that your catalogers use, and there are probably lots of penciled notes in those volumes, so that future catalogers will know how things have been done in your particular library so that the system remains consistent. And that's exactly what our Google Doc is doing for us. Finally, I purchased some Dymo label makers so that each of our team members would have easy access to one as they were working. And we decided that to keep books off the shelf for a minimum amount of time, this is how it had to happen, that each team member would work on a book, decide the classification, change it in the ILS online record, and then also create the new spine label, apply it, and get that book right back on the shelf. And that really saved us time, and usually books were off the shelf for two hours at the most, and that was wonderful. Our team is composed of the director, that's me, and two and sometimes three of the folks that help with cataloging, and also our children's library. And I do recommend that you keep your work team small, because if you had, I have 14 staff and I tried to involve 14 staff intimately in this project, it just would have gotten cumbersome, and it wouldn't have gotten done efficiently. But don't keep the team too small, and I don't, and you know who you are, I mean those who are thinking I should do this by myself. If one person is doing it, it's tempting to think that that would be then the most consistent, it won't work. And I'll tell you why, because the DDC Dewey is a mature system of classification that was built for libraries. And BISAC is essentially subject headings that were built for bookstores. And so it's not comparing apples to apples. In fact, it's more like comparing apples to chainsaws. It really isn't a very easy thing to do. And so if there's just one person trying to figure this out, I think it's going to be just too overwhelming. And so we had a team, a small team of people, all of whom were intimately acquainted with what we were doing and how we were getting it done. And all of us, all of us ran into roadblocks every week. We had some titles we just didn't know what to do with or a subject classification we weren't sure which way we ought to go with it. And we were able to discuss it with our fellow team members. And that collaboration is what got us down the road. And drawing the map while driving is how I tried to explain what we were about to do to the team as we were launching it. Really, we're going down the road and we're looking about 20 feet ahead and drawing the map as we go. So that means, of course, you're going to hit some roadblocks, you're going to hit some cul-de-sacs and you got to turn around. Times you're going to have to go more slowly than you'd like. It's all part of the process. So we all had to relax. If you are catalogers out there, you know you want to get things precisely right and you want to do it the first time. Well, in this process that really wasn't possible. So we all had to relax into it a bit. Separate and collaborate seems a little mutually exclusive. It's not. Separate, I mean, assign a Dewey section to a single team member. So that team member can really get to understand that section as a whole. And that will inform them when they're trying to break it up into the various bisect sections. Some bisect categories like cookbooks are dead simple. I mean, you can just grab it from 641.5 and plunk it down into cooking and Bob's your uncle. There are others like social services like self-help and there are many more that will end up having under the same Dewey number, you'll have many different bisect headings. So having a Dewey section or a large part of a Dewey section under the control of one person really does help them grasp the whole picture. And do meet often with the team. And I mean often like weekly at least to discuss problems you're having and how things are going and review that master list together. Do schedule those meetings. Don't just expect them to happen off the cuff because it really is important for the whole team to get together often. Continue to use that master list as a working tool and don't be afraid to type in comments questions as you go and the whole team will be reading it and that will really help those weekly meetings. And we also use some extra Google documents to track our progress and I'll show you those in just a moment. And those all helped keep us on track. So don't give up. It may seem overwhelming especially at first we found it got easier as we got used to the process so don't throw in the towel it will happen. And it's also a dandy opportunity to get in the stacks and really weed that nonfiction collection as a whole. And I have to say we hadn't needed hours in its entirety in about five years when we started this project so we really dug in there and found a lot of deadwood that we didn't think was there but there it was when we really dug into it. And so we ended up getting rid of a significant percentage of our nonfiction we got rid of quite a few books that weren't doing any good. And now our collection looks great on the shelf and it's all very fresh and vibrant and easy to find and not overcrowded. And it's been a good thing. Finally, don't worry about getting it perfect and I'm speaking to all my fellow catalogers out there again don't sweat the small stuff if you can't decide as a team which is exactly right. Make your best guess go that way and move on. If you have to redo a couple of things at the end of the day when it's all done it really isn't that big. So don't sweat the small stuff just relax and keep going. All right, I'm going to take you right now to the bisac website. So bear with me while I press a couple of buttons here there you go. And there we are. This is the subject headings page and scroll down and there they are those are the bisac headings. And I'm certainly not going to take you through all of these but I will want I do want to point out just a couple of things very briefly I'm going to click on medical. And scroll down and under medical I hope you can see this this introductory paragraph, not all of the bisac primary headings have an introductory paragraph. If they do do not neglect to read it, it gives you wonderfully useful information and as to the intent of the subject headings and it gives you a lot of guidance as you move forward. And I'll scroll down and you can see we've got the sub subheadings starting to come into play. And there are many many as you can see. So that may be overwhelming it's not so bad it works out once you get to know it a little bit. And I'm going to back up and take you very briefly again to one other heading cooking. And I wanted to point out a intermediary subheading is what we called it you see the courses dishes here. We don't need that on our spine labels so we got rid of a lot of these and went right to the tertiary heading and left this out of the spine label entirely again as I think I may have said before. The Dewey decimal system was intended for libraries it's made for spine labels bisac is not. And if you're not careful, you're going to end up with a very crowded and overly complicated spine label you don't want too many subheadings. And that means you're going to have to get creative about what you use and what you don't use and how you truncate and how you abbreviate things to fit in a logical easy for your patrons to understand way. All right, that's that's the bisac subject heading page and I won't spend too much time on that I'll get back to the presentation. All right, and here are the headings that we selected that's most of them that are on the bisac website they're a couple like fiction or youth fiction that we of course jettison but that's where we started and now I'll show you what we ended up with. Here is our edited list, and as you can see we did a lot of truncation, and in fact we truncated even more than that to fit it on our spine labels for example technology is tech TCH. And, and so you're going to have to do that to make it fit on a spine label these weren't created for spine labels. And also you'll see in the red bowl these are headings that we created ourselves we couldn't find exactly what we wanted in bisac and so we made our own. Animals, for example, in bisac is a subheading of nature, and we had so many books on animals and our students use them so much that we thought it warranted its own section, and so we added that health and fitness. As we got into it, we realized that we had so many books on health and so many books on fitness we really ought to divide that up for clarity. And that's just what we did we created a new primary heading called fitness pets, as you can see is its own primary heading and bisac, but we decided to put it as a subheading under animals. And this is one of those things that we didn't get right the first time. We thought pets should be its own section and that's what we did but once we got done with the shelving and looked at how small that collection was, we thought, oh, we've got it wrong and now we need to put it as a subset of animals. And it only took us a couple of days it wasn't that big a deal and so my advice to use if you make your best guess and it turns out to be wrong. It's not the end of the world just fix it and move on and our children's librarian created her own list for the juvenile nonfiction. And so you can see our red bold red terms that we invented for adult and the purple bold terms are ones that she added for the children's collection. And that just goes to show that you have a lot of leeway you make this work for your particular library, your clientele, your particular collection. So you do have a lot of leeway for that. And our wonderful children's librarian did all 2500 of the juvenile nonfiction books herself. And that's because she like every other children's librarian I've ever met, of course, of nature simply give a children's librarian project and step back and watch them go. It's amazing. I think I think that's a important thing you're saying there about customizing this to your own library. Many people when they're hearing about people libraries going away from Dewey to something else, they automatically go to the stereotype of thinking of, Oh, we're just going to make it like a bookstore. No, and I can't find anything in bookstores anyways. No, that's not what this is about. This is, it's actually very similar to working with Dewey or other traditional library catalog classification systems in that you can customize it to what is going on in your library and what's there for you. Just be flexible with it and just think of it as another, even though it's come came originally that bisect did, of course, from, you know, a bookstore point of view, thinking of it as just like another library classification system and use it that way. Exactly. Yep, the toughest part is not overcrowding those spine labels, keeping those subheadings to a minimum. With Dewey, it's so easy you want to make it more, you know, granulated more finely all you do is add a couple of digits to the end of that Dewey number. With bisect, you're going to be adding another word onto the spine label so you really have to keep that in mind. You have to be more creative with it yourself, just like with the tech. Yeah, things that are obvious shortened. Yeah. Yeah. So, and you'll work that out as a team as you go. Right. Here are the shared lists and I'm certainly not going to take much time on this you will have a link at the end to our master bisect list for adult nonfiction, and you're free to take a look at that at any time and I'm just going to give you a quick glimpse at it right now so you see what I'm talking about. I'll make a point here while you're doing this, Teresa that yes for everyone on the show. At the end when we do the archives for this will have recording of the show. A link to her slides and the URL to this as well so don't try and write down and scribble down that ridiculous Google docs. You'll have that will be emailed to you automatically after the show, when they're ready. Okay, well here it is this is our, our version of the DDC for volume set it's our working list. And you can see at the heading here I've got what I call a jump list of so you can jump down to various sections and of course there's the list here that you can scroll I, I don't know I'm just a little old lady and I really hate scrolling so I went to the trouble of making this but you don't have. At the beginning we have our spine label format as I mentioned before each team member was creating their own spine labels. So if you want a consistent look on your shelf you'd better make sure that everybody's doing it exactly the same and this is how we got that fun. And then you'll see, here we go. These are the primary headings and subheadings that we used, and you can see for animals, we really didn't do a lot, there are some, some notes here and there, but we didn't make too many changes. But when you get to something like let me jump down, mind and spirit good grief look what we did it's nothing but read. And that's because we just couldn't again that was the apples to chainsaws thing we couldn't make it work as neatly as we'd like so we worked at it and this is what we came up with. But again, this is our working document and as we catalog we use this, and one of the best features is the control app which I'm going to do right now and that's the find in document control. And it was invaluable as we were working through this if I get a book on say divorce, I want to see if another person working in another section might have also cataloged a book on divorce and I would type in divorce and find out if it's there and if so where they put it. I'm going to use running as an example. You can see we've got two instances of running. Is that right. We've got one here under sports. We've got another under fitness and in fact that is exactly correct, like do we as you know there are several places you can put the same subject, depending. And we had a section of books on running for fitness, and they belong here and then we hadn't we have a big community of marathoners in Kalamazoo, big community. And so we have a section of books on training for a marathon. And so that belongs under sports because that's competitive running. So, there you go. Use the find feature and as you can see this is what we did to keep ourselves real clear on what we were doing and we often they're all cleaned up now. And we had, you know, we could put in comments, you know, should I do this or that or see also that we would communicate as team members one to the other. And so when we had our weekly meetings we would all have been going through this all week long and we would have a very productive discussion a very efficient discussion because of that so we found this just wonderful. I think. Here's the Google document that we use to track our progress the questions box is happily empty. It wasn't always empty. And we we did the collection. First, we had a team weeding. And once a section was we did then it was ready for reclassification, because we found it too cumbersome for the same team member to be wondering if we should keep this item or not, and then try to reclassify it all at the same go this really and we started that way but this really early on we decided to do it this way instead and it helped a lot. So here's a paragraph that I wrote it what's happening and why. And here's the progress happily they all say done. And before that we would have instead of the word done we would have the call number of the book where we stopped and our initials and the date and so as inevitably happens someone goes on vacation or they got blue. And someone needs to step in, we would know exactly where everybody was and where we could pick up and keep the project rolling. So here is the relabeling which is what we call the reclassification and you can say, see that it's happily done. And, but before that we did the same thing we'd have the call number where we stopped and the date, and, and it worked out beautifully. So there we are. All right, so now you're relabeling and you're giving everything a bisect so where on earth do you put it when you put it back on the shelf. You've got a whole lot of empty shelves sitting around in your library you're going to have to think of a way to keep things in order, until you finally get around to reshelving the whole collection. This is what we did. We kept a three digit Dewey at the top of the spine label. And then we put the primary bisect heading and any subheadings here's an example of that spine label so 641 is the Dewey not 641.5 cooking in all caps is what we used for the primary. And then a couple of subheadings, then a blank line, then the author's last name. And a reminder of course that each of title that you handle has to be recatalogued in the online ILS and also on the spine and make sure that everybody's on board with knowing exactly what that spine label is supposed to look like so. And as soon as you create the rule of course are going to be exceptions that's how it goes, but it for the most part our spine labels are quite uniform despite having five different people working on. And do keep again I've said this before do keep those subcategories to a minimum as you can see it won't take much to fill up that spine label will it. And you don't want to be confusing to people or you defeat the whole purpose of this project you want to make it easy for your patrons to browse your shows. If you may be tempted and we were. When you have a Dewey number that's getting split up into a lot of different bisect categories, you think, gosh, should we change that Dewey number to match the bisect so that when it comes time to reshell things are more or less together on the shell. You're going to be losing time not saving time. What you want is for every title that you reclassify to remain very close to their original Dewey position on your shelves. Keep that shelf shifting during the project to an absolute minimum. You're going to be able to get it done when you close the library to do the reshelving project. So don't try to do it ahead of time. And it may be upsetting to have a Dewey number that's got a bunch of different bisect primary headings underneath it. It's okay. I'll show you in a minute how we're showing them. The books are still findable via your opac. It's all good people can find what they want just as quickly as they did before it just feels weird. And do make sure that all staff understand the new shelving system and spot check your shelters. I had, I have rather wonderful conscientious shelters, but a couple of them thought they understood it and as it turned out they didn't quite. And so I would just bring it back to the shelf and retrain and only a couple of times and then everybody was on the straight and narrow and everything looked nice and neat. Also, of course, talk to your patrons throughout the project. We had posters and brochures and things on the shelves, etc, etc. And the best thing we did of course was the one on one chats when people say what on earth are you doing. We'd explain why we're doing it and what we hope to achieve at the end and the vast majority of people were pleased by the whole idea. A couple of older folks weren't so happy with me, but we got them on board so bless them. So do make sure that you can communicate well with your patrons all throughout the process. All right, I do a question about that Teresa. At the beginning of your presentation mentioned that the reason that people were having trouble finding things was that they were no longer teaching Dewey at the school in school. When the teens and children come in. Did you, I mean, did you, was that how you started explaining it to your patrons as well that it wasn't just with this out of the blue there's you know. I would explain that we have, you know, people getting close to 30 years old that are asking us, what do these numbers mean. There were no plans to start teaching it again. I talked with the librarians and they said there was only one librarian now with the media specialist for the whole school system. So there's no way that she could be conducting those classes. Are they using something different at the school as well for their class? No, they're still using Dewey. They're just not teaching it. They're just not the classes aren't coming in as often as they used to do when they had a media specialist for every school. They have one media specialist for the entire system now. And so she just doesn't have the wherewithal. No wonder totally understandable and that's very unfortunately. Oh, indeed it is. Yes. Okay. Yep. So we thought if we're not able to reach them that way and our little explanatory signage wasn't working, what could we do? We can do something. Yeah, so we decided to take on this project. After visiting a couple libraries who had we really liked how it worked. Yeah. So here's a couple of options for you for shelving when you're in the midst of the project. The top one is what we used. We, as you can see the first three there on option one are items that we've reclassified under bisack. And the two in bold red are the original Dewey. So we put in order at the beginning of every Dewey section, the new ones that we just reclassified, followed by all the ones that had not yet been classified. The option for you is to perfectly interfiled them, which I've done showed you here on the bottom. And those are in perfect shelf order. But the ones that haven't been reclassified are interfiled with the ones that have. We found that even though that's lovely for patrons, it made it difficult for staff who were working in a section to catch all the ones that they may have missed. Option one kept everything neatly divided until the entire section was complete and you could easily go to your section and see where you left off and find what you missed. So option one is what we used to keep things in order during the transition. That did mean we had to do perhaps a little more shelf shifting, but it was kept to a minimum it didn't really take up a lot of our time to keep the shelves in order as we worked. Pick it and do what works best for you. All right, let's the happy day has come and you've got everything reclassified. So what do you do now. We closed the library for Saturday and Sunday. We're always closed on Sunday, but we closed Saturday too to give us two days just in case things went south and luckily it went very well indeed. And I after reshelving of course remember we put those doing numbers at the top of every single label well what do you do to cover those up. We covered each one with a little white self stick label that we bought in sheets and I was worried that they might not hold up long term, but I just took this photo and you can see that they're adhering perfectly well more than a year down the road so it's doing what we need to do. And I will point out if you look at this photo. One of these things is not like the others. If you look at the book with the red spine yep, international is a different abbreviation than the other ones. And this was, as you go, these things happen. We started using this, the, the INTER and apostrophe L abbreviation for the first few, and then one of the team members pointed out it looks like internal. And thought that might be confusing for patrons so we went to the more standardized INT apostrophe L. We hadn't caught them all so when I took this photo and oh yeah, there we go. And when you find these things as you will just take off your catalog or had and just smile and fix it and move on. Don't worry about it. It happens. You're even counter that when you use Dewey and other systems as well. Oh, you bet. It happens. So anyway, I had to laugh and I looked at that picture more closely than oh yeah, we are. All right, you're getting ready to reshell. And so you want to be prepared before you start pulling books off. Let me tell you. Calculate the amount of shelf space you have available. And that means shelf feet, not just the number of shelves. I'm thinking most of us have the standard 36 inch wide shelf. But if you don't then you have to know shelf feet, not just the amount of shelves and run a report of course on your ILS to see how many tiles you own in each primary subject category. I'm talking only the primary headings, animals, art, architecture, booking that kind of thing. And then I used one and a half inches per title to calculate the number of shelves we'd need. And it worked pretty well. We had very little kerfuffle as we were actually doing it that we had to shift things we had a little bit, but it wasn't too bad. And make a map to follow and I'll show you that in just a second. Do make a map. Don't neglect to make a map. You will be happy you did. And so make sure that's done prior to everything else starting. And before the work crew arrives, label the starting shelf for each primary category. So you're going to have some bold sticker that won't come off for animals and art and architecture and cooking. And then get every table you can beg or borrow set up and label those tables clearly again with those primary categories you'll have a table for animals and a table for architecture table for art. And, and lastly post copies of the map on your end cap so all the team members as they're working and just have to glance at the end cap and they see what's what. So we started by using splitting up a couple of reshelving teams. One started at the o o o's or what became animals, the beginning, and the other at the very end 999s or true crime. And they worked toward each other and that saved a lot of bumping into one another. The shelves are only three three and a half feet apart so you don't have a lot of room for a bunch of people to be moving past each other. And we also had teams I didn't write it here but we had teams work in the tables. So teams that were pulling books off the shelves would just plunk them down on the correct primary category table they didn't try to put them in order they just plunked them down and went back for another arm load. And then I had another crew at each table and their job was to put them in perfect shelf order. And so they were ready to put back on the shelves and it worked out swimmingly. So once everything was sorted and it went very quickly. Then we had to teams again start putting them back on the shelves in bisac order. And then the teams that had been working the tables had the sheets of little white labels and they would follow along and start covering up those doing numbers. And we got it done in the day. So and that was upwards of 9000 books and so it worked well. It worked well. Now unfortunately we couldn't remove the initial doing number from the beginning of every record in our ILS as a batch process. So we had to do it the old fashioned way manually. But even then all hands were on deck and we were so excited to get this thing done that we kind of neglected some of our other duties to make this happen and we got it done in a week. So hopefully you will have a batch process available to you if not just put your shoulder to the wheel and get it done. And then you can call it complete. Here by the way is a copy of the map I used I created it using Excel but you can use graph paper it doesn't matter as long as everybody knows exactly what's going where. So you make that map. And now everything's done and dusted. And here's a photograph of some of our new books and you can see it's going swimmingly. And the staff are very happy with the new system patrons for the most part are very happy with the new system I still have a couple who like to tap me on the shoulder and tell me they don't see why I had to do get rid of Dewey they like Dewey. But they're all all in it with us and they're all good eggs so it went well. And our nonfiction circulation is increasing and it had been going the other way. I'd love to be able to tell you that it doubled it didn't, but it is trending upward and on a good month, we would have say a 10 to 15% increase over the same month the year before. Not always that grand, but it is trending upward and my goodness that's what we call a net net gain at the win. We have lots of brochures available still and posters on the end caps that show people what the new system looks like and I'll show you the front page of our brochure right here. And I lifted this design straight from the one that the Kent district library did up in Grand Rapids. Thank you Kent district. Because I love the cleanliness of the design like those big bold bars that show you the primary categories. And you'll notice that I've got a couple of categories here with no subheadings listed. And that was to save space sports and science those subcategories are so intuitive patrons don't need any help figuring them out I mean sports you're going to see baseball then you're going to see basketball then you're going to see hockey it's real intuitive when you get to the shelf. Same thing with science you're going to see astronomy you're going to see biology you're going to see mathematics. So that was a bit of juggling to figure out what you're going to put on the brochure and what you're not but in the main. It worked out well for us and we still have those and will in perpetuity I'm sure just for new folks who are new to us and haven't encountered this before. And that's it. Again here are the links and when this goes live online at the YouTube channel. You can click those you jot down my email and send me an email I'll get them to you right away no problem. And I hope it's helpful I hope you if you start a project that you find it is a net gain for you as well we certainly did I'd have no regrets about doing it. Thank you for your attention. I'll happily take any questions you might have. All right great. All right yes. This will this is being recorded it will be available just for anyone to let you know, probably later this afternoon, along with the slides. We do have one question that I'm not sure he mentioned I don't recall he talked about this at the beginning. Is the question that someone did ask already does bisac only apply to nonfiction or does fiction figure into it too. Is there fiction options and bisac and you just decided to only do your adult nonfiction or. Well, let me show you I'll go over to bisac right now for you. I haven't looked at their fiction but I'm going to I'm going to answer that for you right now. Because they do have a fiction section and they also have I'll scroll down here they have young adult fiction and adult nonfiction. So let's click fiction and see what it looks like. Yeah, there you go. You certainly can. But you've only all you're the only part of your life. It was the adult nonfiction. Exactly. So, yeah, okay. Yeah, we have. We have the usual mysteries science fiction and westerns but but we didn't we didn't use this for fiction although who knows we may decide to try it. There you go. So was that was that your fiction people were okay with finding things in there they use it differently than nonfiction, obviously. Yes, our fiction section no one seemed to have any trouble finding and with our fiction also we made it a point several years ago to label them. If they were in a series we put the name of the series and the number that the book is within the series on the spine label. Oh, nice. Yes, and we shelve them in series order. Of course it's within the authors last name but within that author. If they have a series we shelve their books in series order and people have absolutely loved that. So our spine labels are rather taken up many of them with the series and so I'm not sure we'd want to really get into the bisack but it looks like it's there for you they've they've built something for you to use as a framework. People can do that. We do have another question. Did you consider using the bisack heading followed by the first word of the title versus author name. We did not consider that we did not consider that nope. Is that something that I have people seen other places do it that way or. Yeah, I have not seen other libraries that were using it were they doing it the way that you did. Yes. Yeah, they were because again the spine label is such a limited space. Sure. So if you're going to get a couple of subheadings under the primary you really only have room for the author's name. But that's not to say that you couldn't do it the way you describe using the title that might be the path for you might make the most sense for your collection. Right. You're going to have to see what you think you're the people in your community are doing how they are looking at things. Yeah. Yep. The best thing to do is take a collection and do a test run on it. And you don't have to change the books themselves. I mean you could make just some paper with the spine labels on it like I showed you earlier and and put it up on the shelf and then and walked out and look at it. So easy to read. Right. We did a lot of that kind of a lot of that kind of testing as we went. Yeah. And if you have any willing patrons ask them can you, you know, oh yes, you test this out for us come in and do a test dry run and see can you figure out what we're trying to do here with or without previous instruction like if you had no idea and walk down this aisle. Tell us what you think. That's a great idea. Someone who doesn't have any preconceived notions about how it's supposed to work. Yes. Yes, exactly. Okay, we have another question. I want to know for shelving it. Do you have do you do any of the shelving like bookstores do with books lying horizontally or things like that for displaying them or Well, we don't have much room in our nonfiction collection for a lot of face out displays however in our fiction and large print and biography sections we do have room and at the end of every shelf is a face out display. Every shelf has one and we keep them filled and it's working. And as we go through our nonfiction I was talking with that as a matter of fact with some of the team and we may well rejigger nonfiction a little bit so that we can put a face out on every shelf. It works. It really does face out shelving pays off. Absolutely. Yeah. That's when I'm browsing that I always catches my eye first unless I'm looking for something in particular like a series and where all those books in a row that I need to get to the next one. Exactly. All right, so anybody have any other questions that's the last one that was entered so far. Go ahead and type into the questions section of your go to webinar interface. If you do have a microphone we can unmute you and you can ask your question that way just got to let me know. So, we do have a few more minutes left on our hour today so please do type in anything you do have. The show has been recorded and I will have to process it through YouTube and then into their well I'll go to webinar into our YouTube account. That may take some time so sometime later this afternoon all of you who did attend this morning and anyone who did pre-registering was unable to make it with us today. We'll get an email from me with that information where the recording is Teresa you can send me your slides whenever you get a chance after we're done here and I can post them as well. And then as you said that all the links are there that you'll be able to link to as well when we get the archive up. All right, here we go. We have another question that just came in. Do your pages find holds as quickly as when you were using Dewey? Has it affected that in any way? No, everything was very easy to find once they got used to the new system and of course they had plenty of time to get used to it because it took us a while to get through the entire collection. So, as we went they were they were used to and as I said it took a couple of them a little bit of time to really grasp. But once they got used to it then it's been going swimmingly no there's no hold up at all for finding things on the shelf. Yeah, it's nice that you had like a longish transition period when you were doing both so they can, you know, a sudden shock. Yes, it took us a couple of years and it probably won't take you guys that long we had to stop in the middle, because we had some other projects we had to put this on hold to complete. I ate us in there. And if someone had handed us the edited list that we came up with of subject headings we could have got it done in three months I'm sure. A lot of our time was just talking about it and figuring it out step by step. Oh, sure. Yeah, the development. Yeah. So, since you've finished it's been about a year. Yes, it has. But it took longer than that from when you first started the project because of. Yes. Yes, it was 2015 to 2017 mid 2017 that we completed it. And it was with having to take a break that not that it took an entire time beginning to end. Not at all. Not at all. No, I think we've got it done in under a year if we gone straight through was the only thing you had to do. Yeah, how it works. No. Yeah. If only we could close the library for a month. Yeah, we could have gotten it done. All right. We do consciousness. Thank you. This has been very helpful. Yes. Oh, you're welcome. All right, anybody have any last minute questions you want to ask type them in now, or reach out to Teresa her email address is right there as she said she is willing to answer any questions you have and she had libraries gave her advice and she'll give back to you guys anything. Just a few other seconds for anyone to type in something. I don't see if you're in the midst of typing so have to wait till you send it. It's not. All right, I think we'll wrap it up for today then. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you very much Teresa for being with us this morning. This was great. I know this is something I've read about and heard of lots of libraries doing this process. And it's good to have I think you did. This is a great, you know, step by step here's how you can do it if you're thinking about it and have no idea where to start. Yes, exactly. I'm really glad we're able to get you on the show here. And actually, if anyone's interested trees will actually be back at the end of August for another session too. Another topic I'll show you that on our schedule and just a second here. So, I am going to pull back the presenter control to my screen here and show you. There we are. All right. So, so this is today's show. Our encompass live website you can go to. If you go to our Nebraska library commission web page you can find it there the lately direct URL was in our, we can do a search on our site. You can use your search engine of choice. And that will also bring up encompass live so far is the only thing called that on the internet. So if you just Google encompass live you'll find us our main pages here, where we have our upcoming shows. Take your upcoming ones. We find and we fix connecting a community at the library that's Teresa back again to do a second show at the end of August if you want to join her again sign up for that one. The archive of today's show I'll show you that first will be right here at the end at the underneath all of our upcoming sessions. We have our archives listed and they're in the most recent ones at the top of the list so today she'll be up here at the top sometime before the end of today will be available. And you will have a link to the recording and the presentation will be there for you. Our archives are also searchable as you can see we have a search feature here we can search all the entire history of the show or just most recent 12 months. Because encompass live this is the 10th year of our webinar series or weekly webinar series of encompass live so and we do have all of our archives on this page by scroll all the way to the bottom and I'm going to quick scroll right now. So, watch it, watch your eyes there. It goes all the way back to January 2009 when we first started the show. So there is some older information here. Old information outdated information and possibly links and things services and products don't exist anymore, but we are librarians and that's what we do we archive things so we are everything is all up there. Everything is dated though so you can tell exactly when the show was broadcast live, and you'll know that that is information as it was happening at that time in 2009 1011 12 whenever. I'm going to scroll all the way back to the top now. But, so you can search our archives if you want to and you'll see today's one at the very top there when it is ready. And as I said everyone who was here today and registered will get an email from me when that is available and ready for you to look at. So I hope you join us for next week show, which is a book talk show here in Nebraska. We have for regional library systems and one of the names is missing from there I've got to add. And we are going to have the directors of those systems here next week just talking for meeting and talking about books that they like. So we'll have some book sharing next week of what our library system. These are they do consulting and training for libraries across the state so please do sign up and join us for next week show and any other shows we have here on the list I've got my September ones I'm getting confirmed you'll see more dates being added as I get those nailed down. Also encompass live is on Facebook you can see I have a link here. I've got our page open over here. So if you are a big Facebook user give us a like over here we do post when our shows are available his reminder to log into today's show. When our archives are available here's last week's reminder saying recording is available. So if you are do use Facebook a lot like us over there and you'll get notified of what we have coming up. Other than that that wraps it up for this morning show thank you everyone for attending thank you again Teresa for being with us this morning. You're welcome. And we will see you hopefully on the next time on encompass live. Bye bye.