On 01/07/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch(a)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(a)dunelm.org.uk