Tim Spalding wrote:
>
> 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 the parent who uses "hip" phrases ten years out of date.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!
Two things about this:
1. This is evidence of how much we still are in the card catalog era,
and how little we have automated. In the physical card days changing an
LC heading meant that thousands of libraries had to get out an eraser,
change the headings on the cards, then re-type the headings. Today that
change should be automatic and instantaneous, but unfortunately it isn't
in many library systems. Librarians scream when LC makes a change.
2. Sometimes you want to keep the old terminology on the old books --
after all, some books WERE written about the information superhighway,
and it was a particular concept that had a particular name. Keeping the
old terminology only works, however, when you can easily give people all
of the connections between new and old and they can follow-up effortlessly.
>
> Anyway, the educative powers of LCSH are surely meager compared to the
> book's contents or even it's *title*!
Book titles can be less indicative of subject that you might expect.
Especially popular books. Scientific book and article titles are good
indicators of content, but their purpose is to inform rather than
entice. When you look at a book like "The Peter Pan Syndrome" you can
easily understand what it's about, but as a keyword search target it's
quite misleading. (I remember the first year or two of the web when a
search on "Bambi" brought up mainly porn sites.)
>
>
> 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.
There are statistical programs that will map your library in this way,
used as collection development tools. It's actually quite fun to see
where the peaks and valleys are in different libraries. They'll also map
circulation to the classification, so you can see where you have lots of
books but no one is checking them out.
>
>> 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.
There is one fundamental difference between DCC and LCC that I find
interesting. Dewey divided up the world of knowledge (as Dee Garrison
says "into ten tight holes"). Then he fit the books into it. LCC is
based on the library collection. That is, there is no theoretical "world
of knowledge" behind LCC -- it specifically classifies the books in that
particular library (with an obvious Western view to their meaning). In a
sense, later editions of DCC have morphed in this direction, but the
main classes were already set. So if one area of knowledge gets lots
more detail than another it's because that's the level of detail in the
books in the LoC collection. We do have to ask ourselves: what is it
that we are organizing? Knowledge, or the manifestations of knowledge in
our collection? There is no "universal classification" so we have to
decide what our bias is going to be. The really interesting question to
me is what happens when we all manifest our personal viewpoints over
some collection -- do we get chaos, a "common denominator" that is
mediocre, or can we, as a collective, turn out to be brilliant?
kc
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Sat Jun 02 2007 - 10:16:35 EDT