The Dewey Decimal Whaaaa?
Jul. 28th, 2008 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI 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?
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?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-07-28 05:26 pm (UTC)Parents fail to parent in the U.S., too; literacy is declining (see: any newspaper), and youth culture has gotten to the point that people pay to have their bodies hacked to pieces, to have pieces sucked out or melted away so as to meet an unlikely (and unsustainable) ideal.
It seems to me that Darlymple's lament describes a dangerous or possibly deadly situation that derives not from excess socialism nor excess capitalism but something else, something that tends to be hidden in the blind spot of partisanship in economic theory. Getting over that blind spot is possibly the most important task of our generation.
Do you think we can do it?
(Pretty neat about the DDC, though. I'd never thought about the ramifications of its having a name. Who gets the money?)