How does a library book get on our shelves?

Have you ever wondered how new books make their way to the Orion Township Public Library’s shelves? Here’s a peek behind the scenes at all the steps a book goes through on its journey to our shelves.

All our librarians are assigned areas of the collection that they are responsible for maintaining (for example mystery, romance, history, etc.). When deciding what to purchase, librarians read several journals, which include professional reviews of soon-to-be published books. They look for multiple positive reviews and consider the needs and interests of our community when deciding which books to buy. Did you know that our librarians also purchase books based on patron suggestions? If there is a book you would like to request that we purchase, you can fill out a form online: Suggest a Purchase | Orion Library. Each librarian builds shopping carts on our book suppliers’ websites, then notifies our acquisitions clerk when they are ready to order. Once the books are ordered, the new titles are imported into our catalog. This often happens weeks or even months before a book is published, so you can search for your favorite author’s upcoming new releases and place a hold so you can be the first in line to check it out! 

Once a book arrives, our cataloger makes any changes necessary to the book’s electronic record (called a MARC record) so that it is searchable by fields such as title, author, subject, and even series. After those details are complete, the book is processed by members of our Support Services team. The book gets wrapped in a plastic jacket and then gets a spine label that indicates in what order it will be shelved (author’s last name for fiction or Dewey Decimal number for non-fiction). Some books will also get additional stickers to identify them as new 14-day checkouts, or to indicate what genre they belong to (like mystery or historical fiction), or what number the book is in a specific series. Completed books are then put on a cart for librarians to review, checked in, and placed on a cart for shelvers to put away on our shelves. 

Come check out our new materials area to find your next great read!

This article was written by Alice Cruz, Head of Outreach and Marketing.