Finding a Book by Its Color
This library is working on providing access to its collection based on the color of the book. There’s long been a discussion that is sometimes meant completely in jest about being able to locate books by visual cues. At first, it seems like an odd thing, but my time working in bookstores made me realize many people remember what book looks like, but not neccesarily the name of the author, the title, or what exactly the book was about. “Well, you know, it’s the one with a blue spine and a photo of that guy on the cover.”
As the head cataloger of a library read an inventory instruction sheet to me at the beginning of the project, she said to make a note of the book’s color on the card catalog card. (We were doing inventory using the card catalog shelf list because the library did not have an online catalog. The shelf list is a list of records of the books in an order that reflects how they’re on the shelves. In many cases, the list is in the order of the call numbers. In many computerized libraries, inventory is taken by scanning the bar code on each book.) When I didn’t respond appropriately, she told me that was meant as a joke. When I sat in class in graduate school and listened to the instructor joke about arranging books by color, I kept thinking, “Why not? If that’s a memorable feature of a book, won’t it just help our clients find materials?” Granted, when books get rebound, the color of the binding can change, so the information will need to be updated.
from the Rowland Institute Library Blog
