Lane Turbyfill

LIS 600
Ethics, Advocacy, and Action Research

Action Research
Introduction
With the ethics and advocacy pieces in mind, I went into the research portion
with two questions at hand:
1. Does the current arrangement of the books in the library facilitate easy
access for the students at my school?
2. Do the students have ideas about how to arrange the books that they think
would help them find the ones that they wanted?
I knew that both of these questions would involve some sort of experiment that would
allow me to watch the students and their interactions. Originally, I had planned to
rearrange the books in a way that I thought would make them easier for me to shelve
and find, but I realized that this would again put me between the students and the
books. Instead, asking the students would help them understand that the library was
ere for them and that, to improve it, they would have to take an active part.
To me, these questions are important because I feel the job of a librarian is not to
control the access of information, but instead to promote and simplify the process. In
order to simplify the process, I had to first understand where the shortfalls were in the
current system, then to analyze how these failures could be improved.
Methods
I knew that each question focuses on a different aspect of the problem, and as
such would take a different task to find the answer. For the first question, I realized that
the easiest way to answer it was to assign the students a book that they were to find in
the library and see if they could. The second question involved the students working
together with an in depth understanding of how the library worked.
Before I began any of the research, I had to make sure the students understood
that there was a system to the library. One of the rules of my library is Everything has
a correct place, but before now, I had never discussed with the students how that place
was chosen. As such, I taught a lesson that explained the Dewey Decimal system, that
it worked in divisions of one hundreds and that each group of numbers were centered
around a topic. I related this lesson to the posters the library has at the end of each of
the Non-Fiction rows that gives the call number range, a funny picture related to the
range, the overarching idea for that range, and a few examples of topics that would be
included on that row. I had used these as reference points for the students, but had
never explained why they were there. Afterwards, the students were given a worksheet
that had them match up call number ranges to topics or topics to ranges. This lesson
was given to all second, third, and fourth grade classes.
The next week, each table of students was given a stack of Non-Fiction books
that were out of order. The task for the day was for the table to work together to put
them books in numerical order by call number. I hoped to familiarize them with the
location of the call number on the spine of the book, as well as getting them used to the
concept that the numbers were put in order by those numbers. When a table thought
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they were ready, I would take the stack and check. The first time, Id tell them they had
a few out of place, the second time Id tell them how many they had out of place, and
the third and any other times, Id pull the books out that were wrong and instruct the
group to find where those went. For this lesson, I prefaced the assignment with a
discussion on whole numbers and decimal places, and that, for the lesson, the students
would be looking at the whole numbers and not the decimals. In the classrooms, the
third and fourth grade classes were working on numbers from 1 1,000, so this lesson
was taught only to those two grade levels.
At this point, I hoped that the students had enough of an understanding of the
Non-Fiction section to begin assessing if the current system worked. The next lesson I
did started with a student at each table choosing a slip of paper that had a book title and
a call number on it. The groups were to discuss where they thought their groups book
would be, and then the student who pulled the slip would go and try to find it. To
prevent students having to go multiple times depending on the number at each table
and possible absences, I had each table pull three slips so that they would have three
books by the end of the lesson.
The next lesson, I explained the point of all of these lessons was to attempt to
find a way to organize the books that would help the students find the ones they were
looking for. I told them that we had looked at the Non-Fiction section, which was
organized with the Dewey Decimal system that used the topics of the books to group
them together. The other sections, like the Everybody and Fiction, used different
organizational methods, but I didnt tell them what. The goal for the day was for each
table to come up with at least four or five different methods for sorting the books in the
library. They could combine all three sections, Everybody, Fiction, and Non-Fiction,
together and sort them like that, or they could keep the old sections or possibly create
new ones.
Findings
For the first question, where I had a lesson that instructed students to find a
certain book based on the title and call number, I found that there are certain areas of
the library that the students do not understand and some that they do. Books in the
700s and 800s were simple for the students to find. I believe that has to do with those
two ranges having their own rows in the library that have almost no other call numbers
on them. This meant that once the students had found the poster with that call number
range, all they had to do was go down the row until they found call numbers near the
one they were given ad then look for their title. Books with call numbers like 599 and
910 were much trickier because they were not with the majority of the books in that
range and were not on the row that the poster was. The 500s and 900s are both broken
into three different rows. The 500s poster is on the first row, and the second row is
labeled with foam number cut outs. However, the 599s are actually on the 600s row
and this is not labeled at all. With the 900s, the 900-919s are actually on the 800s row,
which isnt labeled, the 920-921s are all on a row together with is labeled Biographies,
and the remaining books are on another row that has the 900s poster.
With my second question, my lesson had the students working together to come
up with ideas about how to arrange the books in the whole library. I purposefully
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refrained from giving them seed types of arrangements, other than the numerical
system used in Dewey Decimal, to see if they could come up with ideas on their own.
This allowed them to be creative, but also to have to think about the reality of organizing
a library. Our collection is over 11,000 books, and they had to think about a way to
order every single one of them. Some tables struggled for ideas for a long time, and
others filled pages with possibilities. Once the class had time to think and write down
their ideas, we came together as a whole and discussed. There were five that were
common throughout the seven classes I did this lesson with:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Accelerated Reader level

Call Number
Alphabetically
Size
Color

The first one was almost always the first idea mentioned. One of my main focuses for
the students is to find books that they can read independently, and the only method I
have is the STAR test that Accelerated Reader offers. This gives a level range for each
student, and they are to find a book that is within that range. The AR level is shown on
a blue sticker at the top of each books spine, opposite from the call number. Ive
created a cart of books in the front of the library that is sorted by AR levels to allow
students to find books on their levels quickly. Next, someone would suggest the call
number. I would talk with the class about how call numbers are only found in the NonFiction section because those are books that give you information about a certain topic.
I would ask if there is one central topic for a chapter book, and explain that they would
be hard to sort that way. The next idea would be alphabetically, but the students
couldnt agree what to use. Some would suggest alphabetically by title, some would
say by author, and some had ideas like by the first or last work in the book. With this
idea, I would explain that this was a real system, and that the Everybody and Fiction
books were sorted alphabetically by the authors last name. The remaining two ideas
took a little bit longer for groups to think up, but they were still constant. Size was more
common because the students remembered how I had sorted the books by size in the
lesson about sorting books by call number. I told them I had done that because it made
the stacks not fall over, but that I use hat method in the Popular section, which is on a
shelving cart near my desk. The bottom shelve is full of Non-Fiction books, and they
are sorted by size. This allows for all the books to be seen, instead of the smaller ones
disappearing in between the covers of larger books. Finally, there was the idea of color.
This was one of the more complex ideas that, when questioned about, students had a
hard time explaining. They would start off by saying books that had the same colored
spines would be together, but when asked about spines that had multiple colors, theyd
suggest things like a rainbow color section or to put them between the colors on the
spines.
Conclusions
There were many things that I discovered in the process of doing this research,
the most important being that while some parts of the current library arrangement are
easy enough for the students to understand, there are parts that are not clearly labeled
and cause problems. However, I learned that the lessons I did with classes about call
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numbers and the posters on the shelves helped the students understand that the books
are on the shelves in a certain order and that the posters are there as reminders.
Another important realization was that the students understand that they should be
finding books on their AR level and that sorting books by this attribute would be a useful
goal.
In the end, I feel that the change that I wanted to make, which would move the
Fiction books together into one area and the Non-Fiction into a second would actually
cause problems. This would cause the Non-Fiction to not be on rows, which would
remove the posters put up to show students where to look. If I could find a way to
display the posters, that might solve the problem, but it seems that the arrangement for
those two sections is better than I thought.
However, a goal that I would like to work towards would be somehow finding a
way to sort our Everybody books by AR level. This is problematic because our current
catalog system does not track that information. As such, trying to find books out on the
shelves in this order would be next to impossible, but I hope to find a place to create a
section that I can sort the books in that way.