A Bit of Biography Genrifying

Recently in a librarian group post online, a middle school librarian described genrifying her biography section in the hopes of increasing the circulation for those particular books. The librarian established several broad categories for her biographies, rearranged books into those categories, and in just a short period of time, she saw increased circulation.

Our own biography section also sees limited circulation, and even with new titles added each year, biographies remain one of the lesser checked-out genres in the library. With the sixth grade biography project approaching later this spring, the holiday break seemed like a good time to try a little biography genrification ourselves.

First, we needed to create those broad categories that our biographies could fall into. These included some "obvious" piles, like Sports/Athletes, Authors, and American History. Other categories included World Leaders/Politicians, World War II/Holocaust, and Native Americans. All told, 12 broad groups covered all of the biographies in the collection, as well as some of the collected biographies.

Once all of the books were sorted into piles, it was time to reconfigure their places on the existing shelves. With a bit of rearranging to condense books from the reference section, the biographies are now expanded on the shelving. Some of the section appears below.

The only piece of the genrification process that remains is signage, so stay tuned! We're also in the planning stages of literacy studies class activities to reintroduce students to the biography collection. More to come!