[Publib] Serious Saturday: Shelf Appeal and Circs

[Andy Barnett]

Hard to get serious numbers, since most experiments are necessarily 
partial and not well documented. Public librarians tend to be too busy 
doing things to keep the kind of isolated statistics that would be 
conclusive.

We have weeded  and continue to weed our collection (it's about 10% 
smaller than it was a decade ago) and do not use the bottom shelf in any 
unit. Circulation has increased, but can I attribute it to that or 
statistically show how much of a factor it was? Nope.

We display all our YA graphic novels and all our new adult fiction and 
non-fiction in display shelving, with extra genres, lots of room for 
face out books and big signs. We consider this a "best practice" and 
have adapted the idea from what we have seen elsewhere. Sure it's 
popular, but can I give you a statistic? Nope.

I do know that our mysteries that are on the end of our stacks (they 
face a seating area) go out twice as frequently as those that are in an 
aisle. Based on that, I would like to widen all our fiction aisles and 
make them into browsing areas.

We are sure enough that display shelving works that we have rebuilt our 
library on the Richmond (BC) model, adapting it to our situation. At a 
time when we have access to large shared collections, even medium sized 
libraries can operate more as branches, trying to fill most local needs 
but using the cloud of other connected collections to obviate the need 
for some of the dated materials we might have kept in the past "just in 
case".

We are unusual for public libraries in that we did write up some of our 
experiences, mainly because it helps us understand what we are doing. 
Try our Power Shelving document 
http://www.mcmillanlibrary.org/programs/powershelving.pdf