[WikiEN-l] Re: Categories and NPOV: Libraries?

Fri Jul 1 18:46:16 UTC 2005

On 01/07/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:

> In fact, the research of book cataloging systems was a dead science until
> Yahoo came along some ten years ago; one friend who is a book cataloging
> geek (he actually tried to convince me to let him assign catalog numbers
> based on his own scheme to my personal library), sadly remarked no new
> research had been done since the 1930s. It's a case that in the
> English-speaking world, both the Dewey or LC systems are "good enough"
> for their needs. (Those that don't use one of these either follow a
> home-brewed system created in the 19th century, or, as in the case of
> the British Library -- avoid the issue of cataloging, & simply assign
> a shelf number to their books.) And migrating to a new system is an
> unnecessary cost most libraries -- which are perennially short on
> funds -- want to avoid.

India uses Colon classification, which I believe is the 1930s system,
and I'm not sure you can really call UDC, the turn of the century one,
"home-brewed" - it gets a lot of usage, international standard and
all, although in the English-speaking world it's a minor partner to
Dewey. (The two are, in many ways, similar; UDC is a bit more
flexible, in general terms). And then there's Bliss, which is mildly
obscure and American, but does get some use. There are also
specialised ones - I've experience of NLM, the National Library of
Medicine scheme, but there's plenty others - for specialised
subfields. Not a dead area, just one where the big breakthroughs seem
to have been made <g>

UDC's certainly common enough, and viewed as standard enough, that I
was taught it alongside Dewey, for what that's worth.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk