On 4/23/2010 12:09 PM, Julie Hankinson wrote:
> Cory
>
> Physical books will never go away completely, even though e-books are catching on more and more. Also, you do need traditional classification schemes for e-books as well as physical books, don't you?
>
I'll refer you to Clay Shirky's "Ontology is Overrated," if you haven't
read it--in particular, the bit about library classification schemes:
<http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#of_cards_and_catalogs>
The point is, traditional schemes like LCC continue to be used, despite
preserving what is now often a laughably out-of-date worldview, because
the biases of the scheme itself don't matter all that much. Why? The
reader's interaction with the scheme is generally limited to the
flattened classification numbers it generates, which serve simply to
order physical books from left to right on shelves, grouping them in
such a way as to facilitate browsing.
As soon as the open shelf disappears, through the relocation of physical
books to remote storage, where there are far more efficient methods for
automated retrieval than a topical classification scheme, or to the
digital realm, a scheme like LCC no longer serves the same role.
Realistically, will we continue to make use of a scheme like LCC, even
in this scenario? Quite possibly--for all its quaintness, it's still a
very robust ordering system. In fact, we could be leveraging the
knowledge encoded in LCC (e.g., the textual captions) to provide a much
richer search experience *right now.* Do we *need* a traditional,
shelf-oriented, monohierarchical classification scheme to provide access
to digital full text? I don't think so. My comment was about the
relevance of cataloger skills, not the longevity of current cataloging
practices.
--
Cory Rockliff
Technical Services Librarian
Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
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Received on Fri Apr 23 2010 - 16:03:31 EDT