Bryan Campbell schrieb:
>
> I read not too long ago in a paper by the late Gordon Stevenson that Dewey
> created the DDC mainly for subject cataloging. Mark and park was an
> afterthought.
>
The biggest advantage of a hierarchic classification (and Dewey is
conceptually better in this regard than LC) over verbal subject
indexing is that truncation can very usefully broaden a search. You just
cannot grab all the entries for birds in a subject access, but in a
Dewey access, you can: 598. Unless the subject access is thesaurus-based
and the thesaurus is a hierarchic one where every bird name refers
to "birds" as a broader term. Even so, the numeric decimal class access
would be more elegant. And free of language barriers.
In Germany, classified catalogs were widely in use until the 1970s.
Then, before OPACs came to shed new light on the virtues and potential
of classification, verbal access became en vogue and classified
catalogs were abandoned. Why? It was felt that words come so much
easier to those using catalogs, and a classification is too hard
to understand...
Besides, of course, all classifications were and are badly outdated.
B.Eversberg
Received on Wed Feb 07 2007 - 04:08:00 EST