Blog Post about Dewey
Interesting discussion about organizing books in libraries. Read more.
posted by laura @ 8:45 AM
2 comments
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Tuesday, August 29, 2006
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2 Comments:
I read the article and all the comments posted by other readers. I think these people have to much time on their hands.
The basic question that the poster does not answer is how do you find anything if the item doesn't have a call number? How can you provide access to a collection without knowing where anything is or how to locate it?
The answer is... you can't!
The most basic service that a librarian provides is access to the library collection. The most efficient way to provide that access is to have a specific shelf location for the material. Dewey does that, and has the added benefit of co-locating materials on similar subjects so that browsing is also an option. People sometimes criticize Dewey for not bringing similar subjects together, but those problems are often not the fault of Dewey but of improper classification by the cataloger. There are often multiple choices for a Dewey number and sometimes we choose the wrong one. Dewey is also constantly being revised. Because of this, new numbers are added and old numbers deleted to provide more co-location of materials. The lesson...it is much easier to criticize something from the outside than try to work within the system to fix the problems. An honest appraisal of Dewey would show that for well over 95% of the titles, co-location is not an issue and it is getting better all of the time.
I get fired up by discussions about "organizing books" from people who have no intention of actually organizing anything. What will happen the first time someone actually tries to find a particular title as demonstrated in the posters suggested scheme? The user will walk around trying to find the proper area, not find the title, ask a staff member, who in turn will walk around trying to find the title. Oops! How much easier is it to have a call number and know exactly where on the shelf to go for a particular title? Ask an LA how long it would take them to find a paged item? We are here to provide access to our collection and make it easy to find the materials people are looking for. That was the intention of Dewey over 100 years ago, and it is still our role today.
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