Picture Book Neighborhoods

What are Neighborhoods?

Picture Book Neighborhoods are a way to organize our picture book collection by subject, rather than alphabetically by author’s last name. Previously, all picture books were grouped together under fiction or nonfiction. Now, every book is organized into a category that we call a Neighborhood, then a subcategory that we call a Street.

Example:

Think of the Neighborhood as an umbrella, and Streets as categories under that umbrella.

Play is the title of a Neighborhood containing all of our picture books where play is the main subject matter. Sports is a Street within Play containing books whose main subject is sports. So a book about baseball would be found in the Play neighborhood, on the shelves marked Sports.

How do I find books?

Our Neighborhoods and Streets are designed to have as few overlaps as possible. If you know what subject you want, its location should be apparent once you look over our list of Neighborhoods and Streets (see the Neighborhoods Map & Guide). Each Neighborhood has been assigned a specific color, which can be found on the map and as a label on every book. 

There are signs posted on the sides of the picture book shelves identifying each Neighborhood, and the shelves are labeled with the name of each Street. Within a Street, books are organized by author’s last name, so you can browse or easily identify a specific author.

Why Picture Book Neighborhoods?

This system is meant to give children more control and familiarity with the library and to make it easier for them to bounce around between related ideas. If your child wants books about trucks, they are only a few shelves away from books about cars. Or, if your child wants books about dinosaurs, now all of our dinosaur books are together.

We also created this system in response to how most people tend to look for books in our library. Most people are looking for a subject, not a specific author. This makes it easier to browse around for books, and hopefully lets you find a great book that you didn’t even know we had!

If you have any questions or feedback about neighborhoods, please stop by and talk to us at the desk!