So now I’m wondering, is or is not the so-called genrefication of libraries controversial among librarians? Like, are librarians as a culture resistant to changes like this or more interested in, for lack of a better term, just pushing 📚?
At first blush, it seems to me to make perfect sense that libraries should find ways to reflect the ways in which people successfully find books in contexts such as both offline and online bookstores, but this also shows you just how long it’s been since I’ve needed to find something in a library; I guess that I didn’t realize books weren’t sorted by genre within the Dewey Decimal System’s top-level categories.
All of which tangentially reminds me that when I took this quiz from the New York Public Library, I got shelved in 636: Pets & farm animals.
Awesomely, this category is actually listed in technology — rumor has it because back in Dewey’s day, farm animals WERE technology? It’s one of our favorite DD idiosyncrasies – just like you, dear reader, you idiosyncratic riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
This raises the question, then, of how a librarian at a library undergoing genrefication would shelve me? What’s my genre?