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

Fri Jul 1 23:47:00 UTC 2005

I wondered about the same thing last month... I was at a librarian's
convention discussing blogs and information sharing.

OCLC, the online computer library center, is one of the big
repositories of catalogue information.  They take input directly from
member libraries, so for small works that might only exist at a few
libraries, they trust what those member librarians say about the
works' classification.   (They're also cool because they are
considering a WorldCat wiki for annotating their database.
   http://outgoing.typepad.com/outgoing/2005/05/worldcat_wiki.html )

I wrote them to inquire after the classification of  Wallace Reyburn's
humorous 1968 'biography' of Thomas Crapper, "Flushed with Pride"  as
"non-fiction".   Here is part of their response:

========================================
Classification and subject analysis for a majority of the records in
WorldCat are generally based on guidelines set by the Library of
Congress using their Subject Cataloging Manuals and their
classification schemes.  These items can likely be gotten from the
Library of Congress: http://loc.gov

We ask our member libraries when cataloging to follow the AACR2
cataloging rules and the rule interpretations and guidelines set by
the Library of Congress.

[...]

[I]t was originally cataloged by the Library of Congress as a
Biography which puts it into the non-fiction category. There is also
an authority record indicating that this record relates to a real
person, another test for whether it is a true Biography or not.
===========================================

--Sj

On 6/30/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> How do libraries handle it?
> 
> When I was about eleven, I discovered that my local library had a copy of
> Immanuel Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision" shelved among the science books.
> I went to the librarian full of indignation, demanding that they reshelve it
> under "science fiction." The librarian somehow calmed me down... and the book
> stayed where it was.
> 
> Well, I'm older. (And to tell the truth the geologists seems to be a lot less
> uniformitarian than they used to be. Asteroids extinguishing the dinosaurs?
> Well, OK. But I still don't think the fall of manna that saved the Israelites
> resulted from the earth passing through a comet's tail.)
> 
> Anyway, it seems to me that librarians must deal with this sort of thing all
> the time. And the many public libraries that use the Dewey Decimal system
> can't just fall back on the Library of Congress. Although perhaps there's
> some central authority that recommends Dewey classifications. But in any
> case, someone has to decide whether Velikovsky is science or science fiction.
> Who does? and how?
> 
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-- 
++SJ