Mr. Spalding--
What is the title of your wife's book? If the description isn't
accurate and our system has the title, I'd like to correct the
misconception.
Thanks--
Jane Cothron
jcothron_at_beachbooks.org
Tim Spalding wrote:
>> 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 the parent who uses "hip" phrases ten years out of date.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 Mon Jun 04 2007 - 12:39:54 EDT