Dewey Decimal System

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

In reference to the recent staff report about the Dewey Decimal System :

My father was an information scientist (which includes a lot of study of libraries, book classification systems, etc.) and I’ve followed in the family business, since I’m a technical writer.

Sharing the world of computers, we often argued good-naturedly about the future of library organization. He maintained that a library could organize its “stacks” arbitrarily, using a database and robots to retrieve books based on your selection from the catalog. Neither the Dewey nor the LCC would be necessary; you could select books like you do from Amazon.

In fact, my local library in Sunnyvale, CA does almost that. If they have a card catalog, I’ve never used it. Either at the library itself, or from home, I do a database search for the book. This returns its Dewey number, and also tells me if the book is out. From that I can retrieve the book myself. The library could just as easily put in a system where a staffer retrieved the book for you from the stacks. Even a robot could.

At the time, I argued against my father based on my love of books and my wonderful experiences working as a shelver at my college library. You never know what has been written until you look at stuff next to what you thought you were looking for. And the stacks have this wonderful, quiet air of knowledge and wisdom.

Now I think that the classification systems are a good, old-fashioned backup. Databases, etc. cost money that not every library (especially outside the US) has. A worldwide system is more efficient, so one that doesn’t necessarily depend on computers is good. As for arbitrary shelving, having non-savvy humans fetch their own books is more cost-effective than building the robots.

Card catalogs are automated as well (or were). When I was in college, an organization called the OCLC (forget what it means) produced a computerized LCC and Dewey catalog which they frequently updated with new book titles. You subscribed to one of their services and received regular packets of cards or computer tapes with the new info. You then simply added the cards for the books you had or planned to acquire. Increased standardization and less work typing up cards.

2

You need some sort of cataloguing scheme, to tell you (or the staffer, or the robot) where in the stacks to look for the physical book. Given that, why not use a cataloguing scheme which actually has some use to it? A book has to be somewhere on a shelf; why not near other books with similar Dewey or LoC numbers?

3

If the shelves were only being accessed by robots, then a simple sequential catalogue would be easier to use, because new acquistions could be added to the end of the physical series, and thus at the end of the shelf. Adding new titles to the Dewey-organised stack eventually entails moving large blocks of books around, to make additional space.

4

Of course, I point out that sometimes I’m not looking for a specific book, but a specific topic. In that case, the classification by subject is critical. I go to the stacks and see what books the library has under a subject, pull them out and look them through to see which I want. For instance, when I researched for the Staff Report on numerology, I did this at a few different libraries. If I had asked a robot to retrieve books, I’d have had a stack load that were useless (many of the books I rejected just by title, or a glance at the first page.) I suppose the robot wouldn’t care if it wasted time, but I would have cared: it would have taken me much longer to find what I needed.

So, agreed, if you know the title and you’ve got robots/computers to find the books, the numbering system is irrelevant. But if you’re not looking for a specific book, then I submit that human beans have it all over machines, and that a classification system is extremely helpful.

5

Just wanted to say, nice report. Bravo.

6

A number of libraries now catalogue and shelve by date of acquisition; usually, these are cross-referenced to a subject catalogue. The main problem with this system is that when (not if) a book gets misplaced, it is harder to find. No one will ever run across it and say, “wait a minute… what is a book on koala love doing here in the history of New Brunswick section?” If a Dewey book 428.2 is missing, there are logical places to look first (482.2, 248.2, etc.).

Just in case the bigwigs at the University of California’s SRLF & NRLF are reading…

I’m also a big fan of browsing by subject. You can usually use the online database to pull a sequential subject call number list, but it’s not the same as the real books.

7

Every year more libraries finally run out of space and yet have books they don’t wish to get rid of, so most of the larger academic and many large public libraries have remote storage facilities. (In the case of my library it’s a former supermarket across town that’s been converted into a warehouse.) In a few libraries, the number of books in remote storage is actually larger than those in the actual library, and the process of retrieving/paging them is becoming automated. This is where your robots will probably come in rather than in actual libraries (unless they decided to go with orangutans ala Discworld).

If you’ve never been to the Library of Congress it’s a must. The tour of the Jefferson Building is impressive enough (an explosion from the robber baron era of white marble and some of the most brilliantly witty paintings and sculptures you’ll ever see- the artists who did the ornamentation had sly senses of humor and hid quite a few things- if there is such a thing as a da Vinci Code type legend it’s probably there) but the lesser tour of the mechanics of operating the place is a lot more interesting than it sounds. There are more than 300 million items owned by the place (ranging from a Gutenberg Bible to the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets the night he died to a slice of Tom Thumb’s wedding cake to the official papers of 20,000 people you’ve never heard of and many that you have- it’s just the Library at Babel) and how they accession it is fascinating.

8

I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. The DDC has no fiction classifications at all that I’m aware of per se; almost all DDC libraries separate out Fiction and shelve it by alphabetizing the Author’s last name. By contrast, the LCC libraries I’ve been in shelve the fiction under the “P” section of the library; IIRC the Univ. of Rochester had all the Science Fiction under “PZ”, a section I knew and loved quite well (found in the bottommost floor of the stacks, the second sub-basement!).

9

The Humanities and Social Sciences Library of the New York Public Library system (the one with the lions that most New Yorkers mean when they talk about “the” library) is pretty impressive, too. The big park behind it? (See here.) Most of the library is under the park.

On the other hand, the rare-books collection of a major academic library is impressive in other ways. They check what you’re carrying, and generally require at least two forms of photo ID; it’s not quite like an airport, but close. (And you don’t take anything out; you read it there – preferably, wearing gloves.)

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington doesn’t even let you in the door unless you have a PhD, or else are working on one and have a letter of introduction. (I’m only an amateur scholar, and was doing a bit of legitimate Shakespearean research a couple of years ago where my only alternative to the Folger was in New Zealand; the Folger still wouldn’t let me in, but they finally agreed to make and sell me a microfilm of the very rare 1728 book that I required.)

10

DSYoung, thanks for the comments: that was a problem in tense. Shoulda read in past tense, when the LCC system was first developed. I’ll have it corrected, mch appreciated.

11

Then you have libraries like mine, where they prefer empty shelves over real books and discard anything that hasn’t had sufficient circulation over some years, leaving nice, clean, blank spaces on half-empty shelves. Much nicer-looking and no need for dusty, musty archives. Also, you can peek between the bookholders and see what’s going on in the next aisle.

In the future, I imagine cataloging will indeed be by acquisition date, but since there won’t be any printed material produced anyway, that should work fine. Everything will be online, so there will be no need for physical libraries, just computer/Internet terminals. And if the world will ever work out the copyright issues, everything ever written, played, danced, acted or hummed will be available on Mars as easily as between the lions at NYC.

12

They do because the DDC gives them an out.

American literature goes under 813. This includes all American fiction. Here’s what my Dewey Decimal Classification and Relative Index, 8th Abridged Edition has to say:

This is the 1960 edition, so it may have changed by now, but most libraries when we older folk grew up would have used this guide.

It was a shock to go to college and have to learn the LoC, after being a page in a DDC library during high school. I quickly learned, though, that science fiction was PZ 2.5, in with the other genre literature. I think the only stuff beyond it was PZ 8, fairy tales, but you could find something of fascination on almost any shelf in the P’s. Fiction started with English novels in the PR’s, went to American in the PS’s, and genre in the PZ’s, but the PN’s - nonfiction about the arts - was almost as big.

I never cared for the rest of the LoC alphabet, because it never came together in my head as meaningfully.

13

Actually, Dewey covers fiction, under “literature”. But the typical American library has non-Dewey sections for “Fiction”, “Mystery”, and “Science Fiction”, alphabetical by author; and “Biography”, alphabetical by subject.

Just when “fiction” becomes “literature” is vague. The various public libraries in my county have Jane Austen, for example, filed both ways.

14

[Hijack]For Jane Austen as Science Fiction, see The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fford.[/hijack]

15

By the way, just in case anybody is curious as to how a book is cataloged (be it Dewey, LoC or most others), it depends on many variables, most in particularly the budget of the library. Many books (most of the newer ones in some libraries) come from the “jobbers” (for-profit companies that sell books to libraries) already cataloged or at least with the the catalog number already done. Should the library, say, receive some books that are not precataloged, the easiest thing to do is check an online database to see how other libraries have cataloged it. At calleges this is done with the OCLC (40 years ago it stood for Ohio College Library Center, but it long ago went worldwide and though it kept the same acronym it now stands for Online Computer Library Center) and making any moderations needed for edition or whatever.

If, and it happens more often than you might thing, the item has never been cataloged, then the original catalog is done with both huge books and specialized software. (I had to catalog books using CyberDewey when I was in grad-school; my understanding is it’s a lot easier than the totally manual method.)

Among the harder parts are determining the subjects of the book according to Library of Congress Subject Headings. This is very important as most library patrons who are interested in a topic may not know the names/authors of specific books, they’re looking by subject, and what subject headings the cataloger gives them determines whether they’ll be found. This can be a lot harder than it sounds.

For example, suppose you have a memoir by a man who was a butler to Zsa Zsa Gabor, Orson Welles, the King of Thailand and Ted Kennedy. Should the book be classified as all of those people, or just the ones who occupy a huge part of the book, or should it just be under memoirs and butler? This leads to some sometimes odd or even laughable cataloging. For example, Death of a Salesman has the subject heading (this is a cut and paste from the LoC record

  • Sales personnel–Drama.*

For a long time Angels in America had two subject headings: Angels–Drama and Cohn, Roy M.–Drama., though that has since been edited to include Mormons, AIDS, Gay men, Sexual Orientation and the vague National Characteristics, U.S., all followed by –Drama..
For non-fiction, just what is the main theme of the book will determine its catalog number and physical location, and that’s not always super obvious. A book about the role of railroads during the Civil War, for example- should it be shelved with books on railroads (385.xxxx in Dewey) or the Civil War (973.xxx) or technology in general or military industries or what exactly? And then there’s the old thing of “what do you do when you’re handed a letter written by the state treasurer’s wife to her daughter in 1931” or a book published by a vanity press that’s a long rambling stream of consciousness about nothing in particular and with an anonymous author- there is an exact way to catalog those. It’s actually a rather interesting field.

16

This is fascinating to me, as a new MLS student and a new page at a public library.

Something that I personally have noticed in my first few weeks of shelving is that the graphic novels and trade paperbacks at our library are divided between three sections: the 741.5 area (near books on drawing), General Fiction (under author’s last name), and Young Adult Fiction (under author’s last name, or more than likely, just stuffed in the spinning racks with Young Adult paperbacks). This bugs me mostly because I’m a fan of comics and graphic novels, and I’d love to see them all together on a separate shelf or even a prominent display. I would think “one-stop shopping” for this sort of thing would better serve our patrons, but I’m just a page right now, so I have no say.

17

The question of who decides where a book should be categorized, and how it’s done, was something that I read about briefly in doing the research, and I started to get sidetracked into it, but then I decided it was way beyond the scope of the question. Hie thee to a library or a college that has a library science department, and they’ll show you the volumes devoted to classification. One can, after all, get advanced degrees in library science: it’s not something to be learned from a simple staff report.

18

Oh, I just started my first two classes for my Masters in Library Science a few weeks ago, and I look forward to any classes on classification. I was just curious NOW, but I think you’ve done two outstanding reports back to back, and I really enjoyed them.

19

This was the best Staff Report ever!

I was a longtime Library Volunteer. This report was just beautiful. :slight_smile:

20

I think a good reason for learning the Dewey Decimal System is simply to avoid the wrath of Conan the Librarian.