Explore the Collection

Welcome to the Glades!

Our nonfiction books are now organized into larger topics to make it easier for you to find the books you are looking for. Each large topic (or Glade) will include the topics related to it based on their Dewey Decimal number. For example, in our “Nature & Stem” Glade, we gathered up all of our science, nature, technology, math, engineering books into one place. If you were to try to find all of these books on the shelves, you would have to start in the 00s (computer technology) and go all the way to the 630s (animals). Instead, you can now go to the Nature & Stem section and find all of these books in one color-coded area which are then grouped by their Dewey Decimal number.

Here is a chart of our Glades and some of the popular topics they include. 

If you are looking for a book from the catalog, the listing will include which Glade it is located in. Head to the Glade listed and then look in numerical order for the Dewey Decimal number from within that Glade. If you have any questions about this new system, please reach out to one of our staff members and we would be happy to help you find what you are looking for.

Here is a chart of our Glades and some of the popular topics they include

Why have we done this?

For over 145 years, the Dewey Decimal Classification system (DDC) has helped librarians classify where our books should go. However, as public library collections have become more diverse than it’s founding standards could have imagined, DDC can make finding what we are looking for rather difficult if you are browsing. The DDC system uses numbers and letters to identify and locate books. With this system, browsers among us have to search different parts of the collection (dictionaries are in the 400s, while travel guides are found in 914-917) to review all things concerned with travel, for example. With this in mind, we have begun to move away from the DDC to a more “user-friendly” model that looks a little more like a bookstore. We modeled our Glades system on the one created by the Darien Library in CT.