The Indian Pueblo Cultural Center Library has been using the Library of Congress classification system for the youth section. Because the library will begin circulating for the first time later this year, this is an issue because youth and used to using Dewey to navigate collections at school and public libraries. However, Dewey is known for racism and prioritization of white Christians in the classification system. There is a current movement among librarians to decolonize libraries by moving towards genrefication.

I started this process by doing some research into the benefits of genrefication for youth and reread some articles I had come across in grad school, which are linked at the end of this post. I determined the main benefits include:

Faster location of books for patrons, leading to less frustration
Ability to create specific book categories that highlight the unique IPCC youth collection

I created a spreadsheet with some genre ideas for both children and teens and started going through the youth collection, entering each book into one of the genres on the spreadsheet. I found that one of the most difficult aspects of genrefying an Indigenous collection for youth is that many of the older books frame Native nations in the past tense or cover nations from all over North America. It is difficult to decide whether or not to move these to history or culture, and definitely requires examining the books on a case by case basis.

After going through all of the books I started the next step of this project, which was refining genres and creating a color coding system. The labels below are all the new genres for the youth collection and their respective colors.

Next, I had to figure out a call number system. This was tricky for several genres such as Native Nations because they require more information. I decided to make a guide for patrons as seen in the images below.