[Genealib] RE: Why do you rearrange your collection?

[Naukam, Larry]

for those of you who know HTML, and I hope I have gotten this right:
/<rant

I personally would like to rearrange some parts of the collection for ease of use, but that's not gonna happen. Not with 50,000 books to move.

First off, 70 years ago the decision was made to have two filing sequences (both Dewey) and have G for genealogy and R for (Rochester) local history. There is no written guide as to why something is cataloged one way or the other. I was  a cataloger for governemt documents and travel books (back when there was more than one for the entire county), and first asked about it more than 20 years ago. 

This means that the genealogy dealing with the family of Susan B Anthony is on the local history shleves while  cemetery and church records locally are in the genealogy shleves - except when they are not. So, training in our department takes a VERY long time for staff.

When I have suggested refiling things to staff (besides the ever present who is gonna do it and when response), the thinking is the same. Why mess with what's worked? It's not professional to have things filed by kind and location. And we won't even get into why things are in any one of 7 different locations and rooms, only one of which is publicly accessible.

Then why is Erie County NY which is only 30 miles away from us filed in genealogy while Westchester County, the best part of 350 miles away, in LOCAL history? [Because Dewey works northward and westward from NYC, except we aren't sure why some counties are considered local and others are not.] One would think that it would be, say based on mileage from where the book actually is being held.  Why are [local town] cemetery records filed in at least 4 different places, because they were done over a perod of time by different catalogers? Why are books on how to do black or Jewsish or Slavic or whatever other kinds of genealogy filed all over the 929.0000 to 929.1999 numbers  (and don't forget Marion Kaminow's guide to genealogies in the library of congress, a 4 volume set which has 2 in the 016's and 2 in the 929s? [These were done by the same cataloger, too].

What it means is that shelving and shelf reading is made more comples that it needs to be. Patrons always "help" us by reshelving and over half the time they get it wrong. When we go to look for something and don't find it, we immediately look in the "other" shelving schema to see if it's there, and in the storage areaa as we have had an oversupply of numerically challenged pages who cannot shelve "correctly' even after 2 years of training.

Now, this is not a screed about our specific problems. It is a resuly of 30 years of hearing "why aren't all the "X" books togther like they are in [their home town, suburban, whatever] library? Yes, we should have standards of professional acatloing and description, bu if things are NOT in closed stacks, where you would NEED to have everything in order, what's the harm in shelving at least some of the data - census, cemetery records, church records, etc. - usefully for the patrons? I mean, we do this for them.

/>rant