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

[nitoda]

It's still possible to buy a four volume printed set of Dewey manuals. When I trained as a librarian in the Uk in the seventies classification and cataloguing was still seen as an essential professional skill. I spent many years doing my own classifying in a college library - we were so old fashioned I even had people type catalogue cards, you remember, they were filed in neat little cabinets?
People in small libraries can still buy a set of the manuals and classify their own stock however they choose. Yes, there are rules, but one can often subvert them!

[aelfie.livejournal.com]

Cat and Class has been dropped from the required core classes years ago.

But I took it anyway and lucked out with an amazing teacher who made it interesting and fun....doesn't mean I want to do it for a living, but at least I know how.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Both were required courses for my Library Tech program, and I too lucked out with a great teacher.

Then again, I'm also the sick and twisted sort of person who actually enjoys that sort of thing!

[aelfie.livejournal.com]

My grandmother is a cataloger...it makes so much sense now!