Rethinking English

In 2007 I travelled to the Czech Republic to study for six months as part of an exchange programme. The course I took was thankfully all in English, so I didn't have to worry about learning to speak fluent Czech. However the Library at the University was almost entirely in Czech and Slovak. I remember visiting it once. I remember not knowing what or where anything was, and I remember being quietly terrified.

Czech Literature @ Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart published under a Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-SA 2.0) by suchosch, available at: https://flic.kr/p/aUx5Fi

Fast forward to a couple of years ago, where I am working at a Library in a Further Education College that teaches English for Speakers of Other Languages, and accredits students in both the IELTS and Cambridge English systems. Looking at the stock I could feel that quiet terror returning. It became evident that two classifications schemes were in use; like the rest of the stock, the books were classed according to the Dewey Decimal System, but they were also labelled with coloured stickers that ostensibly indicated the difficulty level or testing system. However over the years the practice of colour-coding the books had fallen out of favour, so not all books had a coloured sticker. Also, because of the way Dewey is arranged, textbooks, practice exams, and workbooks for the different language course were filed in confusingly different places. Previous Librarians had further complicated things by either using the author's surname when classing course-related material, or the abbreviation for the course or exam. For example, English Pronunciation in Use: Elementary by Jonathan Marks might be 425 MAR or 425 ELE depending on who had processed it and what edition it was. No amount of shelf-signage or directions could save it. If the collection was confusing enough for me to try an navigate, can you imagine how horrifying it must have been for the students!?

In the relatively quiet weeks during the summer, between an intense programme of weeding and space redesign, I decided to try and fix the mess that had befallen our ESOL collection. After consulting with a Library colleague also involved in ESOL support, and the head of the languages teaching staff we came up with a classification system that we felt would work. ESOL students generally look for Library material suited to their level, for example if they are studying for IELTS level 6 they will want to find workbooks, practice tests, grammar, idioms, and writing samples specifically for IELTS level 6. We ended up annexing several Dewey numbers are reallocating them according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Using the CEFR meant that we could work around the difficulties surrounding words like 'beginner' and 'intermediate' which in different testing systems denote completely different levels of ability. Decimals were used to separate workbooks, practice tests, and works on writing, pronunciation, grammar etc.

After deciding on the schema, I removed every ESOL book for the shelves and re-classed it. Including books at other campus Libraries. This ended up taking a lot of space, time, concentration, and effort. Not to mention sticky-notes! The updated shelf and classmarks were put into our Library Management System, with the addition of a controlled thesaurus to help make searching for things on the OPAC easier. The old shelfmark labels and coloured stickers were removed - which was hell on my fingernails by the way - and a new shelfmark was added to every book. I worked on the project full-time for over three three weeks, with a bit of overtime here and there.

It might seem like a lot of effort, for what amounts to relatively small portion of the collection. But I'm really glad I did it. The books are so much easier to find now and the response from the teachers was overwhelmingly positive. If I can do a little bit to ease the anxiety that students feel when facing a shelf full of books in another language then it has been completely worth it.