It is SCIS policy to assign genre headings to works of fiction, including fictional films, television programs, etc. In some cases more than one genre heading may be assigned, as well as subject headings from a theme. Obviously not all SCIS records will contain a genre heading.
The ‘Guidelines to Using SCIS Subject Headings’ contains a comprehensive list of all the fiction genre headings used by SCIS (see section 5.7).
To see which records in your library contain any of the above headings, you can do a subject search within your library system. Similarly, if you want to see which records on the SCIS database have been given genre headings, you can login to SCIS OPAC:
Go to Advanced options http://opac.scis.curriculum.edu.au/vwebv/searchAdvanced.
- In the ‘Search’ box type in the genre heading, for example ‘school stories.’
- Select ‘as a phrase’ from the drop down menu.
- Select ‘subject’ from the second drop down menu.
- Once you retrieve your results, you can then select ‘Publication (most recent first)’ from the ‘Sort by’ drop down menu.
Taking the guesswork out of genre by Brendan Eichholzer, from the latest issue of Connections, explores the issues of shelving by genre. He argues that ‘Knowing where each book lives is a key component of the job description.’
If you are thinking of genre-fying the library there are some excellent posts from colleagues outlining the processes they have gone through – here are two of them:
