Part 1: A Map for the Future

I have a confession. When I first started as a school librarian I had a lot of frustrations with the 300’s. Arriving in my 9-12 library after a history PhD and years as a librarian at research universities, I was intimately familiar with Library of Congress call numbers, and very rusty on Dewey. Initially, I chalked up my frustrations with Dewey–especially the way the 300’s pulled critical aspects of history out of “History” (in a 900’s sense) when it involved minority groups like women, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants–to a need to break my old LCC habits.
But, why do we use Dewey? Our mission is to prep our students for college level research, but we aren’t teaching them college library organization. So, I fantasized about a college prep high school library that was organized by LCC instead. What would that look like? What would we gain? What might we lose? How much work would it take? This post is the first in a series as I answer those questions.
Right now I am neck-deep in transitioning my collection from DDS to LCC, and the number one reason I committed to this work boils down to consistency of purpose. Our school prepares our students for college–and in my domain, particularly college level research and information skills. Colleges use Library of Congress call numbers. Instead of teaching my students how to navigate our library and information landscape in Dewey, then sending them off to much larger libraries that use a more expansive and totally foreign looking system and pretending I prepared them, I decided that the work is worth the potential.
Further contemplating the potential gains and losses, I realized another thing. Currently, I have to help many of my students find books in the stacks because they can’t follow a call number to the right spot on the shelves. Despite having had library instruction in lower and middle school, I consistently have students tell me they can’t find a book that, when I go to look with them, is exactly where it should be. So, it shouldn’t be extra work to teach them how to find things when they get to the upper school and encounter a new system. I am already teaching them how to find things, why not use the opportunity to teach them the system they will use as they continue their education and give them a chance to learn and practice it while they have me to provide lots of support. I also teach our 9th graders about controlled vocabularies and subject headings (see my Lego Lesson for how I do this), so switching to LCC means that I am aligning the physical shelf layout with the search language which should reduce cognitive friction: no more searching in one language (LCSH) and finding in another (DDS).
(I should note, briefly, that we genrefied our fiction collection several years ago, and it remains separate in this reclassification process. Fiction will still be labeled/shelved by genre and author last name. Reclassifying has raised some of my longstanding questions about where to put certain works of literature, ie. should Austen, Twain, etc. be in our popular reading or in 800s (now P Class) P Class? We moved our graphic novels from the 740s to our genrefied collection as their own genre. This move highlighted that short-handing our collection into “Fiction” and “Non-fiction” doesn’t really account for the 800’s/P’s or narrative non-fiction intended for popular reading, and perhaps that is why those areas of our stacks are so dusty.)
There are a few other conceptual wins that I hope will subtly help our students in their research. One is that the date of publication will be much more visible, being the 4th line of the LCC call number. Currently (pun intended), despite both me and their teachers talking about recent scholarship, many students compose preliminary bibliographies with deeply out of date resources despite more current ones being available on the shelf. Our students often treat the publication date as a ‘post-production’ detail—something for the bibliography. By making the year the fourth line of the call number, we move currency to the ‘pre-production’ phase. It turns the shelf into a physical timeline. A student looking for Vietnam War research can now visually distinguish between a primary source published in 1967 and a historiography published in 2024 without even opening the cover. I hope that the increased visibility will enable my students to start paying more attention.
Circling back to my problem with the 300s, reclassification is shifting where things sit on the shelves in ways that largely brings books together by topic. Reclassifying is healing the fractures that previously existed, particularly for topics that used to sit in the 300s rather than 900s. For example, a student looking at the American Civil Rights Movement in our shelves would have to move from books in 301 (Social Structure), then move over 12 shelves to 305.48 (Women), then another 3 shelves to find 305.8 (Ethnic and National Groups), before moving 15 shelves down in another aisle to find books at 320 (Political Science, Politics and Government), then 4 more shelves down to 323 (Civil and Political Rights), before finally needing to go half way across the library (5 aisles of stacks over) to get to 973.8 (History, US, 1901-). As we reclassify to LCC, our students can find all of those same books at E185 (United States–Afro-Americans–Status and development since emancipation). Other works, like certain literary non-fiction (The Journey Home, by Edward Abbey, for example) are moving out of history and to language/literature. In the case of Abbey, reuniting this work with his others in PS3551 (American Literature by authors, 1900-1960). In a future post, once all the data is complete, I’ll share more about what shifts and where in this transition, but so far numerous topics–like civil rights–are feeling more coherent.
(I am also in the midst of a large and long overdue weeding project that will make dated options less available. But, even so, I  notice that many of the books our students request through our borrowing partnership with a local university are also frequently very old, despite other options being available.)
Given these advantages, it’s important to acknowledge why I struggled to find examples of schools that use LCC. The two most powerful–and entwined–reasons are tradition and inertia. School and public libraries use Dewey. And, because our school libraries are already using Dewey (tradition), the real, time consuming, and challenging work of reclassifying an entire library is a major obstacle (inertia). If we set those aside–I’ll come back to the latter in subsequent posts in this series–we may find that we encounter the ideas of tradition and inertia among our faculty and administrators as well. To anticipate and respond to faculty push-back, I hope that the reasons above will speak for themselves. But, for other resistance, your individual context may hold the keys. At our school, our faculty have a fierce independent streak. This worked to my advantage in some ways as it means I have a large degree of independence in my space, too–I didn’t need to present this change as a proposal to our faculty or make much of a case at all. Within the context of teacher and department autonomy, the library is seen as my domain so I am trusted to do what I think is best.
Also particular to my context, I am moving our whole collection to a new library in a new upper school building this summer. Potential faculty discomfort at not knowing their way around the space as well (“the books about Europe have always been right there!”) is moot–everything is moving anyway. To mitigate the “lost” feeling, I am also investing heavily in clear, disciplinary signage—using the faculty’s own language (e.g., flagging subclasses in DS (Asia) for Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, the regional history classes we teach, instead of just ‘DS’) to bridge the gap. Even without moving buildings, clear signage or maps can mitigate the fear of being disoriented.
Ultimately, I identify reclassifying as a pedagogical act of backwards design. My goal is to teach students to do research of a high caliber so they are prepared to do research at the college level when they graduate. Reclassifying my collection isn’t, then, a clerical library task; it’s an act of information architecture–turning our stacks into the infrastructure of instruction. By aligning our shelves with the systems of the academy, I am giving our students a map that doesn’t expire at graduation–quite literally changing the shape of their research journey.