A joint project by the Technical Services and Youth Services staff at the library will improve the way children's entertainment DVDs are organized. "We felt that many of the current categories had become too confusing to customers as many titles could be placed in several different categories" shared Technical Services Supervisor Thad Hartman. Library staff who work closely with children and their parents report that most customers are looking for media materials based on the age of the viewer. 

In response to this need, the library will keep some current categories, elimate a few confusing categories and create some new age-bassed categories for that material.

The new list of genres will be:

• Infant / Toddler - Includes titles like Baby Einstein
• Preschool - Includes titles like Arthur
• Lower Elementary - Includes titles like Pokemon
• Upper Elementary - Inlcudes titles like Star Wars: Clone Wars
• Disney
• Feature
• Holiday
• Music

Where will customers notice the biggest improvements?
"We hope that this new system will do a better job of grouping like materials together.  For example, this new system will allow all of the PBS kids DVDs to sit together, while the X-Men, Batman, and Star Wars cartoons will be in a different category," Hartman explained. The categories of Fairy Tales, Animated, Early Ed, and TV will be eliminated in favor of the age based categories for these materials.

Changes began this week, and the reprocessing of the Youth Services DVD collection will take place over the coming weeks as materials are returned by current customers.