I have a lot of books. I’ve finally reached that stage in my life where I actually own enough bookshelves on which to store the books.
Problem is organizing them. I’ve weighed the benefits of Library of Congress versus Dewey system, and I’m gonna go Dewey since I’m more familiar with that. And Dewey’s a cinch, for fiction. Just alphabetize.
But what about everything else? I find myself holding books of Greek Poetry, for example, and wondering if those should go in the poetry section or the Greek section. And what about things like “History of Greek Poetry”? History section? Greek section? Poetry section?
How the heck do you decide these things? Is there a “Dewey Decimal System for Dummies” book that someone can recommend? I don’t want to get a degree in Library Science, I just want some help organizing all these books in a way that I can find the stupid things when I want them.
Oh, and one more easy question. For fiction, what about authors with two last names (John Twelve Hawks, I’m looking at you.) Do you alphabetize according to the first last name or the second last name?
You can get some information about Dewey from this page, which includes the first three levels of the classification. The same site includes some links to educational resources. A lot of this is aimed at librarians, so it’s going to be more than you really want.
Some of you questions aren’t about Dewey, but about other aspects of cataloguing, such as shelf-listing. In the case of authors with “two last names”, you treat the two names as the surname, so that you sort by the first element.
If it was me, I’d go to my library website, look up the books, and see what number and subject terms they were listed under. I don’t know if my library is using Dewey or not. (If my local one wasn’t, I’d look for another.) An example is listed below.
883.01 HOM
Title: Readings on Homer / Don Nardo, book editor.
Publication info: San Diego, Calif. : Greenhaven Press, c1998.
Physical description: 176 p. ; 23 cm.
Bibliography note: Includes bibliographical references (p. 168-172) and index.
Personal subject: Homer–Criticism and interpretation.
**Subject term: Epic poetry, Greek–History and criticism. **
That’s news to me. I worked about 20 years as a cataloguer, and all that time, as part of the cataloguing process, I assigned Dewey numbers. Classification is part of cataloguing, with the other major parts being descriptive cataloguing and subject headings.
I’ve only been a cataloguer for thirty years. Even though it’s more often the not the same person doing both things at the same time they really are two different things:
[ul]
[li]Cataloguing = describing the physical object to make it identifiable[/li][li]Classification = describing the intellectual content of the book[/li][/ul]
Even though it’s more often the not the same person doing both things at the same time they really are two different things: