Bryan Campbell wrote:
|... In the Preface of the first edition of the DDC, Dewey wrote:
| The system was devised for cataloguing and indexing
| purposes, but it was found on trial to be equally
| valuable for numbering and arranging books and
| pamphlets on the shelves.
|... Dewey's classified catalog still exists in the Librarians Room
|of the New York State Library.
Yeah, I don't believe there are many classified catalogs still left in
the U.S. When I attended library school at Rosary College (now
Dominican University) back in the mid 1970s, the card catalog of the
John Crerar Library (formerly in downtown Chicago but housed at the
Illinois Institute of Technology at the time and subsequently merged
into the collection of Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago)
was a classified catalog. As I recall, the subject cards had Dewey
numbers where one would normally see subject headings. There were
subject heading cards in the catalog, but they were cross-references to
the various Dewey numbers used for the topics. The "call numbers" were
*not* Dewey (as you also noted, Dewey was used strictly for subject
classification purposes) but, rather, they were shelving locations in
the closed collection. (Due to space constraints, the shelves were
arranged first by book height and then chronologically from left to
right on each shelf.) FWIW.
Harvey
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Received on Tue Feb 06 2007 - 11:34:28 EST