The OHS librarians made the decision to unite the district libraries this spring by changing their system for categorizing books.

Genrefication is a way of organizing books by genre instead of alphabetically by the author’s last name. The OHS library has had the latter system for many years but wanted to switch to genrefication to match the middle schools and the county public libraries.

“[Genrefication] will be good when [incoming freshmen] come to high school and recognize the colors from middle school and it is a nice transition for the kids,” Ms. Gina Figler, library media specialist at OHS, said. “Kids already in high school will be less overwhelmed by the quantity of books we have.”

Because the OHS library has a large amount of books and the process for reorganizing them is a tedious one, librarians and their student workers have been working for a month and a half on the new system. The process involves scanning each book into the Destiny computer system, which provides a summary of each book to help the workers identify in which genre the book belongs. Labels are made, the new sections are entered into the computer, and the books are re-shelved in their newly designated area.

There are ten genres that are identified on the spine of a book with a color and two letters. For example, dark blue is FA, which stands for fiction adventure, and it covers action and survival stories.

“I think if you are trying to get kids who don’t normally read to read, they will because they can easily go straight to a genre they know they enjoy,” Vi-vi Phan (12), library worker, said.

Librarians and workers hope that genrefication will attract more people to the library and will allow students to enjoy the library instead of stressing to find a book.

The new system will hopefully be fully in place by the end of this school year.