Quoting Tim Spalding <tim_at_LIBRARYTHING.COM>:
>
> In LT's case, the problem was that a core of us, and the people I
> asked to lead it, agreed on a high number of top-level categories. We
> felt that "container categories"--categories that really only existed
> to hold a number of other ones, and which weren't concepts people
> really glommed onto—should be kept to a minimum. The model here was
> bookstores, which are okay with putting "games" and "sports" somewhere
> near each other, without having a "recreation" category you need to
> navigate first. A lot of "systemmatizers" didn't like this—they kept
> fighting for a small number of top level categories a la Dewey, and
> wanted to find low-level slots for what are, in bookstores, top-level
> concerns (ie., putting the "pets" section way down the chain in some
> science > biology section).
It's actually comforting how universal this disagreement is. :-)
It was this tension between Dewey (an inveterate systematizer) and the
"give it to me now" folks that gave us the weird world of classified
books on shelves that could only be found using LC subject headings in
the online catalog. Dewey's idea was that the catalog was to be
classified, and the entry to that was his "Relativ Index", which is an
index of terms. So you would look something up in the Relativ Index
then go to that place in the catalog. There you would discover what
the library had under that topic, and could browse up (broader) or
down (narrower). Of course, in Dewey's day, stacks were closed. I
don't know how this became a book-on-the-bookshelf ordering system.
But we don't have an index to the classification we use for the
shelves, we use an entirely different system for the "give it to me
now" index function: LCSH. The upshot is that we have two different
ordering systems that have pretty much nothing to do with each other
(either DDC + LCSH, or LCC + LCSH), and I can understand why the users
are confused.
BTW, I have recently run into this tension with the re-working of the
W3C web pages. It used to be that the home page had everything on it
in a long, alphabetical list (RDF, SKOS, OWL, XML, etc.) and you could
go directly there. Now the home page gives you categories (Web
Design, Semantic Web, Web of Services...) and you have to guess which
one has what you are looking for. If you want RDF you have to go to
Semantic Web, then Linked Data ... The systematizers have hijacked the
web site, and now I can't find anything. *sigh*
kc
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Wed Nov 11 2009 - 10:36:31 EST