Shelving, Shelving, Where the heck is that book?

When I started working on this project I checked out a ton of graphic novels and manga from the public library. While there, I noticed they had the same issue I had run into before... the dreaded shelving issue.

In the school where I work, the majority of graphic novels are in 741.5, with the exception of graphic nonfiction. Every year I check out the graphic biographies and put them out in my classroom, and every year the children are shocked to find out they exist. These are titles the kids are interested in reading once they know where to find them. Usually you won't find a fifth grader reading about Alexander the Great (at least not where I work), but once my students see the graphic biographies they're ready to read them.

I was even more befuddled when I tried to figure out what was happening at the local branch library. They had the usual three sections for 741.5: children's, young adults, adult, but in the interest of making them more accessible (and I would guess easier to shelve) they had put out a seperate shelf that held only manga titles. I would assume that the original intention was to make them easily accessible to patrons, unfortunately there was an unintentional side effect. I don't know if it was poor training or general laziness amongst the employees, but in many cases you have to check the manga shelf, the young adult section, and the adult section to find what you were looking for. I have had to look in all three locations to find serialized volumes of Fruits Basket, Vol. 7 might be in adult, Vol. 12 in young adult, and all the other volumes elsewhere. It makes things very confusing. I wanted to ask, but I couldn't picture myself walking up to the branch librarian and saying "I noticed you have a very inefficient shelving system for your manga, can you give me your rationale?"

As a result of this confusion I decided to send a questionnaire out to various librarians to see how they handled shelving and a number of other issues. The results of the shelving question were interesting. The majority of public librarians responded that they kept everything in the 741.5 section, while school librarians seemed to have optioned for a separate graphic novel section. Although they seemed to uniformly pull the fictional graphic novels and place them in a prominent, easy to find area, they were inconsistent with their treatment of the nonfiction graphica. Only two of the librarians I heard from incorporated their nonfiction graphica into their separate graphic novel collections, the rest kept them filed with biography or in the appropriate nonfiction section.

Personally, I think that if you're going to go to the trouble to create a separate section for fictional graphic titles, you might as well create a section for the nonfiction ones as well. Many of the librarians answered the questionnaire that boys were the primary readers of the graphica (I'll address that separately later), and research shows that boys enjoy reading nonfiction titles. It only makes sense to me, to emphasize the availability of nonfiction graphic titles as well. Individual graphic biographies tend to get lost in a sea of other biographies. Give the more serious graphica as much of a chance to shine as you would Naruto. What's the line from the Kevin Costner movie - "If you build it. They will come."