The Dewey Decimal Whaaaa?

[elfs]

I took the kids to the library Saturday to have them take back some books, and to pick up some new ones. They were done pretty quickly, but I wanted to browse the shelves and see if there was anything in the nonfiction section that caught my eye.

As I was moving from the web design section to the section on graphic design, I passed through the shelves and spotted Theodore Darymple's lovely book of social commentary, Our Culture, or What's Left of It. The book is a series of essays by Darymple in which he writes about the decline of literacy, the rise of an anarchic youth culture, the failure of parents to parent in the welfare state of the United Kingdom, and the expectation that universal health care will put you back together again no matter how shatteringly stupid you've lived your life.

I took a second look. The book was classified 610: Medical Science, General Topics.. It was wedged between the smiling face of Andrew Weil and a book on Chinese Herbs. I looked at the spine: the book was not misplaced. That was the code the King County Library had chosen.

Darymple's a doctor, and much of his cynicism comes from working within the UK Medical establishment, and many of his anecdotes arise from meeting the deliberately hopeless in such a setting. However, the book itself is not at all about the practice of medicine. The Dewey Decimal Classification of 610 was inappropriate.

I discovered this morning that the publisher recommends DDC 306: Social Commentary. The next time I'm in the library, I think I'll let the librarian know.

By the way, did you know that the Dewey Decimal Classification system is a private system, and you must subscribe to it in order to get your book classified and others must subscribe to it to use it in their own libraries?

Comments

[aelfie.livejournal.com]

Actually, your local library does not choose whatever Dewey code that has been given to any book/media/movie/whatever. All those decisions are made at the National Level by Library of Congress. The LoC uses a set of arcane rules AACR 2 (Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, Rev 2) which decides how/where things should be cataloged, rather than common sense. They may take the publishers recommendations into consideration, but they make the final call.

As a librarian, there are frequent moments when I'd like to hunt these misanthropic librarians down and smack them upside the head for a bad cataloging job, as it is usually very obvious that they didn't bother to look at the book very carefully.

How the DDCS and Card Catalogs developed into a national system is really interesting...but much too lengthy to go into here. But to sum up, like you said its a subscription service and the cataloging librarians at your local library RARELY do on the fly cataloging, as you can just yank the MARC files from LoC's OPAC and dump it into the local OPAC...saving the taxpayers money so we can do something else. =\

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

In this case it was probably OCLC rather than LoC--LoC has their own system of classification they use instead of Dewey Decimal.

I believe our library system does employ one or two people to do classification, but unless something is (for instance) self-published, almost all of their job is just looking up what the national service decided.

[aelfie.livejournal.com]

From what I remember...my Reference Prof said that LoC made both decisions since they are the original source of printed catalog cards.

But then again, I could be wrong.

My system also only uses a few people and very little is original cataloging done.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

I *think* I remember (from my classes lo these many years ago) that OCLC is also creating MARC records these days, and that their service is set up so that individual libraries can add information in certain fields, which they generally do if a given book has particular local interest.

LoC wouldn't be determining where a book would fit in the Dewey system at any rate, although they probably do contribute cataloging information that would help determine where it should go. OCLC, if I remember correctly, adds information suggesting where in the Dewey system it would fit best, and may have more than one option.