> Tim, first of all I must agree that using old versions of DDC or whatever would be a bad idea. Knowledge has progressed - but that is the point - we *know* it has progressed. We see the fruits of our understanding of the world everyday - from new medicines to space shuttles and beyond...
The thing that hurts the worst are the "new" things that turn out to
be dated—the "Information Superhighway" (LCSH) headings. They're like
the parent who uses "hip" phrases ten years out of date. Mom, you're
*embarrassing* me!
> Now, I know this is list about the new catalog, but I think we need to get somewhat philosophical here: namely, in this day, should we consider the traditional educative role of libraries, *including their "tagging" and systems* or not?
To be frank, the idea that Dewey or LCC is "educative"—in any sense
other than the self-referential (Dewey teaches us where Dewey puts
things)—never crossed my mind. That it encodes a view of knowledge
which presupposes many things up for contention is, however, clear.
(Any system must but Dewey's presuppositions are quite striking
today.)
Anyway, the educative powers of LCSH are surely meager compared to the
book's contents or even it's *title*! The most educative
classification is one which gets us to the books quicker so we can
actually start getting educated.
Lastly, a thought experiment about the educative power of Dewey.
Imagine a library that gave every Dewey number the same space
irrespective of the books on hand. I see a library with VAST empty
spaces in the phrenology and divinatory graphology sections, and the
Buddhism books stacked ten deep so you could hardly get at them. After
all, if Dewey educates, then we should expose the whole system and as
faithfully as possible.
> Tim, I've read Shirkey's article about on how ontology is overrated and I'd love to engage people more on this. I would argue that while the LCC and LCSH are certainly influenced by Western understanding*s* of the world (after all, not one person did is responsible for these things), it still can help educate people as well who on their own might not think to see the connections between this and that thing. If you suggest a complete overhaul, and a new "bottom up" system, do you suspect that those connections that others have seen (the authors who wrote great, insightful books for example, and the people who read them and built upon what was true in them... and of course the discipline-specific people who classified them as best they could in accordance to the general shared understandings of experts in various fields) in the past are not *really there* in some sense?
I think a bottom-up system would be basically rational. Taken as a
whole and looked at statistically, LibraryThing's "subject" tags, for
example, are pretty conventional. History books are classified
"history," not "past events" or "purple fish." After all even
fundamentally arbitrary matters of taste cluster strongly; beer is
more popular than amaretto. And the binary nature of a shelf-ordering
system will not do away with all the problems there. In the world of
physical organization, contestable things have to have a winner. One
view of reality has to prevail out and the book shelved in one place.
That's one reason I think such a system should avoid pretending to be
"true" in any way—just useful to as many people as much of the time as
it can. Fundamentally, I don't think a book has an appropriate
classification independent of how the classification is *used*.
In this regard, however, I want to make a point I've never seen made,
for all the—perfectly true—talk of catalogers' expertise. That is that
library books are generally classified by people who have not, in
fact, read them all the way through. My wife's third novel, for
example, sports an "Alcoholism" LCSH because the flap copy—by a
publicist who had ALSO not read it—mentions it. In fact, the character
in question is a textbook heroin addict who sometimes drinks, not an
alcoholic. Nobody on LibraryThing has made that mistake. I suspect
it's because the read-through rate is higher.
To go further, opening up classification to outside input does not
necessarily mean catering to the lowest common element. On Wikpedia,
for example, one does not find the "common man's" opinion of minor
Greek poets, but the opinion of people who care enough to edit those
articles.
I suspect that a new classification system would be much the same.
People would work on the part they know. A well-designed system would
reward people who know something and limit those who don't.
Democracies can in fact develop and enforce filters. As Plato writes
in the Protagoras, although any Athenian citzen can speak in the
assembly, if the question is a technical one, like shipbuilding, and
someone gets up who doesn't know anything about it, he gets hooted
down.
> I guess I believe in "elitism" in some sense. I believe that people not only can not let children view the world any way they want and I believe that there are some authorities who, in good "leather-footed journalist" style have been more curious and interested in this or that aspect of our world than most, have worked very hard to make contact with reality that's out there, and then have put together this or that enlightening and useful mental model (sometimes for scholarly and sometimes for popular consumption). I believe these people know far more about certain aspects of our world than I do.
Often so. I don't really care for Shirky (or Weinberger's) desire to
stick it to "the man." All things being equal, I like the man at least
as much as his enemies. I believe in truth, just not true
classifications. I'm not even opposed to the idea that libraries
should take a (slight) educative role in compiling their collections,
making sure, for example, to have a copy of Homer around even if the
raw popularity wouldn't justify it. But classification is another
matter. We're trying to *get* people to books, not stocking or writing
them.
> I recommend the book "Sacred Stacks" as a good place to think about this more.
Thanks for the tip.
Received on Sat Jun 02 2007 - 09:18:32 EDT