Using StackMap with Collections Shelved by Subject

Neighborhoods, a word-based classification system, is beginning to pick up steam as an alternative to traditional library systems like Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress. We spoke with Becky Bowers, Manager of IT, about how the Princeton Public Library uses neighborhoods in tandem with StackMap to provide easy wayfinding.

We implemented StackMap while we were doing a renovation of our second floor in 2015. Collections moved a lot and we wanted to have a wayfinding system so that our card holders could find where the items were now. When we were doing the renovation, we decided to make neighborhoods. Neighborhoods is basically combining the benefits of bookstore browsing with Dewey. We found that people really just want to browse collections. Some customers just want to look for cookbooks or items in the philosophy section and sometimes Dewey isn’t in order depending on what you’re looking for you. The benefit of neighborhooding is that you can put them all in a browsable collection. So you might have 300, 600, and 900 in a collection but a neighborhood allows you to group them all together, and with StackMap you can map them.

Our neighborhoods are things like history, science and nature, health and wellness, business, and technology; I think we have 16 of them. Each starts with a prefix, then the call number, and then it’s the first three letters of the last name of the author. In StackMap, it’s really easy to map them because you just do it like you would a normal call number, for example “F” for fiction at the front and then the call number. StackMap made this really easy because they have that unique starting phrase for the call number and then the actual number to match by. You can put them in order by call number and then the prefix allows you to differentiate them by the other shelves. 

-       Becky Bowers, Manager of IT, Princeton Public Library