I am looking for any advice about creating a new foreign language collection in the library. I have ordered about 30 new titles in Spanish and I look forward to adding more throughout the coming months and year. My question is about shelving in particular. Do you shelve the books in with the literature? Do you create a separate shelf/shelves for your foreign language materials? If so, do you also separate out any foreign language movies? Any and all advice is welcome! Thanks!
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My library is multilingual and we separate our books into language collections. All the fiction books are organized by author last name and all the non-fiction are sorted using DDC. Our classifications look like this:
EN F WAL - English fiction
EN 910.9 WAL - English non-fiction
We use CH (Chinese), GR (German), FR (French), DU (Dutch), JP (Japanese), KO (Korean).
Hope this is useful :)
I like working with indexes ( complementary). For easy access to contents.
We use 460 before the DDC number so all Spanish books sit together in the non-fiction area. We use 469 for Portuguese and 440 for French.
Hi Ashley,
Our library supports an International Academy program within our 9th-grade high school. We are also just building up our collection of titles in Spanish. I have decided to create a separate area. We have a few titles also in French and German. I like the idea of creating an entire display area and shelving area named:
Foreign Languages of Foreign Language Collection. Some of the bigger public libraries separate their collection in this way. I think this gives the library a richer more diverse atmosphere. Students will browse this new collection whether they are all speaking the language or not. We also have dictionaries in different languages so with a few beanbags and a couch we have created our International Space in the library. :)
Wow! That sounds fantastic!
You can ask the reference librarian of the public library in your community, to let you know which is the right classification for literature books according to the decimal classification system created by Melvil Dewey.
I created a separate section, and will keep it like that until the collection is well known.
My most important piece of advice is to try to buy books that were written in Spanish, not translations.
I have gone to the Feria de Libros en Guadalajara and that is a great way to get to know the publishing terrain across Latin America.
I like to order the books by subject. Using tenth Melvil Dewey system.