Shelving Reference and Circulating Collections Together
Posted by: David Tyckoson
Another question from the Booklist Webinar. I talked a lot about integrating reference and circulating books, which brought this question:
Q: Are the reference books shelved with the circulating collection cataloged as Reference or just made a circulating item?
A: That depends on how you want to handle them. If you want the reference books that are shelved with the circulating collection to have a different loan period than the norm for circulating books, then you do want to have a separate designation for the reference titles. In my case, reference books go out for 3 days at a time whereas the “regular” books circulate for 28 days. By continuing to label them as reference, this helps the user understand the difference before checking out the books.
If you give the reference titles the same loan period as other materials, then I see no reason to designate them as reference. All books can be treated the same and no special labeling is required.
Once a decision on loan periods is made, the handling of new books is easy. A problem that inevitably comes up is whether to change the labeling on books already in the collection. While fixing the labels makes things neater, this can be a very labor-intensive project. In this economy, I would just let it go. If you look carefully at this photo of a section of my library’s reference collection, you can see some books with orange tape on them, which was our “Biography” designation from about a decade ago. When we eliminated that separate section in reference, we did not go and remove all the orange tape. Over time, it will disappear, but for now we live with this somewhat unsightly look. Fortunately, I doubt that any of our users ever even notice.
January 28th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
I had to shrink the photo to fit the blog file size restrictions. You can see orange tape on the red books, top shelf, second from left (Biography Index, if you are curious) and on the top two shelves to the far right, behind the plant.
February 12th, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Our reference, especially the encyclopedias, are not being used. So, we have taken them off the reference shelf and let the encyclopedias circulate like our other books.