Guest post by Emily McDonald, Lawrence Public Library

Lawrence Public Library (Kansas) is always looking for ways to be more inclusive and celebrate diversity in our collections and catalog. Our Celebration Picture Book collection was expanded to include more non-Christian holiday stickers and "Undocumented immigrants" was added to all the necessary catalog records before we outright replace "Illegal aliens" later in the year, what was next? When Kate Ray, former LPL cataloger, shared Rebecca Green’s guest post on the 220-299 optional arrangement with me back in May 2019, we knew this arrangement was the perfect fit for our library. We wanted to use this arrangement because of its equitable treatment of religions rather than giving the bulk of the schedule to Christianity. It has the added benefit of allowing all the religions packed into the 290s to have room to be built out more than what we can do in our system with the current DDC. The Dewey call numbers at LPL are limited to 8 characters (including the decimal), which means we are not able to drill down to specific topics in certain areas, such as Buddhist doctrines. While the optional arrangement can still exceed our 8 character limit, it helped us get specific topics next to each other on the shelf.

After receiving project approval from the supportive leadership team in June, the project was planned for mid-August. Mid-August is a slow time at the library in between the end of Summer Reading and the beginning of school, making it ideal for big projects like this. It also left us with some time to prep the collections before the update and inform staff about the changes. The first thing we did was coordinate with Collection Development to weed the 200s. We did not want to update more books than we had to because of the size of this project. A week before the project, we shelf read, looked for any missing items, and purged old records out of the system. We also posted "coming soon" signs before the project to let patrons know big changes were coming and that the collection would be off the shelf for a while.

The first collection we updated was our biggest collection, adult non-fiction. On August 12, 2019, almost 1,500 books were pulled off the shelf to be reclassified. While the books were in the cataloging department, we updated the bibliographic call number, item call number, a local classification field, and the spine label. Even with 4 full-time catalogers, we expected it would take us a week to update the adult collection. We were pleasantly surprised when it only took us three days. On the afternoon of August 14th, the collection was back on the shelf. We spent another few days updating the various children’s collection, large print, audiobooks, graphic novels, and DVDs (about 500 more items). Staff holds were placed on any checked out items and system alerts were set up for any non-viable (lost, missing, etc.) items that might go through our automated returns sorter to prevent books being reshelved with the old DDC. By the end of the project and after the checked out items trickled in, 2,500 items were updated from our adult and children collections.

It took weeks of planning, weeding, and prep to make this project go off without a hitch. The biggest help was creating a crosswalk between the DDC numbers and the optional numbers. I also recommend making a "pull list." Kate used our crosswalk to pull books off the shelf in their new order. For example, she pulled 299.511 first because the new number is 221.1. She also labeled the books she pulled first as "shelf 1," which corresponded with the first shelf in the collection.This made it easier to return items to the shelf without rearranging them and required minimal book shifting.

Display showing the new 200s numbers at Lawrence Public Library

After the project, we posted signs with the new numbers to inform patrons of the changes. We anxiously waited for patron feedback, but never received any. However, we did get a few positive comments on a social media post about the project. We also created a 220-299 Project Packet for libraries interested in making the change. The packet contains a DDC to optional arrangement crosswalk, action plan, and a copy of the optional arrangement schedule.

Going forward, we hope to make the 220-299 optional numbers more accessible to any library interested in making the change. As we catalog new books, we are updating the master record in WorldCat, adding a new 082 field containing the optional number with the $m optional designation. We are trying to keep the arrangement inclusive by adding numbers of our own as needed. During the project, we created our own number within the arrangement for Satanism. It is a recognized religion and we moved it from 133.42 to 299.71, our local number. Since the Witchcraft update, we have updated our documentation to make sure 299.9 is expanded to include any potential built numbers.