Book spine labels

When I opened up our supply shipment, I was pleasantly surprised and overwhelmed at the same time...more spine label stickers.  We already had a lot, and with our newest additions I do not think we are going to run out anytime soon - I can safely say we that have a couple thousand, which is good because we have a lot of books.  There are so many of them in fact, that it can really be difficult to find the one you want when you really need one.  Moreover, they have been in different places - behind the circulation desk, in the library office, and in boxes, so I decided to organize them today.  This way we will know what we have and can find them more easily in the future. 

1. First, I gathered all the stickers and matched them up by kind. 

2. Once all the stickers were more or less in the right piles, I started taking them out of the packaging.  The plastic packaging and back inserts really add up when you are talking thousands of stickers.  I put all the labels of a particular kind into one bag this way, instead of twenty little plastic bags.  It also means much less storage space needed for all these labels because packaging takes up so much room.

3. Once stickers were reunited with each other :) and the extra packaging was taken care of, I then categorized them into holidays, genres, topics, etc. and put them into durable plastic bins.

Sorting out kid stickers into different groups: reading, holidays, cultural...

4. Some stickers are not necessarily spine labels, but just fun stickers.  I want us to be able to find these quickly also when needed so I arranged these into five different groups and marked each bag with the appropriate label (Reading, Holiday, Multicultural, Good job/Well done, Just for fun). 

5. I put each sticker on the front of the bins they are in to clearly mark where to find them when the time comes.  The boxes fit nicely into our cabinet. 

Here are the labels that we have: 

Box 1 (yellow) - Genres and Topics:
Folklore, Fairy Tales, Adventure, Horror and Suspense, Science Fiction, Mythology, Humor, Historical Fiction, Classic, Mystery, Realistic Fiction, Fantasy, Sports, Environment, Spanish, French, Dinosaurs, Dogs, Cats, Horses 

Box 2 (blue) - Holidays, Seasons, Awards, and Reading Levels:
Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Jewish holidays, Valentine's Day, India-related, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Newberry Award, Caldecott Award, Alphabet, Counting, Reading Level 1, Reading Level 2, Reading Level 3, Reading Level 4 

Box 3 (red) - Color Shapes and Letters:
Rectangle - Blue, Dark green, Light green, Red, Orange, Black, Yellow, Pink; Circle - Light blue, Yellow, Red, Green; Black letters on white rectangles 

Box 4 (green) - Fun Stickers:
Good job/well done, Reading, Multicultural stickers, Holiday stickers, Just for fun

Our spine labels are much easier to find now by holidays, genres, etc.  

In a lot of ways, this book label sorting project has a lot of parallels to our overall library reconfiguration: grouping resources together systematically, making things efficient, and using good signage. 


The question that remains in my mind is if too many labels make it actually harder to find books.  While the stickers are now organized and we know what we have, I’m not sure I want to use all of them.  By not highlighting just particular themes and genres, or at least just key books in each category, I wonder if we actually do a disservice to people when they try to find books because of spine label overload.  Is this a case of less being more?  You could try to just shelf read for certain colors when looking at spine labels, but that creates a problem too.  For example, our Humor, Christmas, Alphabet, Realistic Fiction, Reading Level 2, and Dog books are all red labels with white writing!  I’ve gone to grab a Halloween book off the shelf, only to see that it’s really Historical Fiction which is the same color and font.  I also find it unfortunate that labels don’t really show on thin spines. 

I also notice that our labels do not take into account all the books we have, or may even inadvertently prioritize certain books over others.  For example, we do not have a spine label sticker for Muslim holidays.  Meanwhile, Jewish holidays get one label (a single "Jewish Holidays" sticker) while certain Christian holidays get their very own individual label (Christmas, Easter).  We want all students to feel that their beliefs are valued in the library, so I am going to look at getting more equitable stickers if we continue to use spine labels in the library.

Do you use labels to indicate genres, reading levels, topics, etc.?  Which ones, and what for purposes?