This is alarming.
FTA: "It's just too confusing for people to hunt down books using those
long strings of numbers and letters"
What??? The longest Dewey numbers are no more complex than a name and
phone number. Older children seem to have no difficulty remembering
those. And in any case, they need only remember them during the time it
takes to walk from the catalog terminal to the shelves. Maybe we could
have a Bluetooth-enabled catalog that would send the call numbers to a
mobile device? Or, in worst cases, they could --- OMG! -- write them
down? Amazing technology, the pencil.
This is a classic case of baby-and-bathwater. I agree totally that there
is a huge area in library access that could profitably be opened up to
user tagging and folksonomy. But it will only be functional if it's
established on a strong foundation of controlled vocabulary and
hierarchical classification. In other words, if a cataloger calls it
"information superhighway -- fiction" and a user would rather think of
it as "cyberpunk," it's useful to the user -- and to other, likeminded
users -- to be able to tag it "cyberpunk." This is one direction that
access is already moving, thanks to industrious and forward-looking
librarians like Chris Harris and Casey Bisson. But the book still has
to sit somewhere in the Library. And nobody is served if it's difficult
and time-consuming to find.
DDC is a system for librarians to keep track of where things are. It
also serves fairly well to help users locate them. And I think it's very
good at keeping things together that are conceptually related, which
helps support shelf browsing. And one of its biggest advantages is that
it's so widely used that it enables broad interoperability in many areas
of the world. Until something better becomes widely adopted, abandoning
Dewey is, at best, irresponsible.
In any case, why are we so enamored of bookstore classification schemes?
Bookstores are not set up to help us find what we're looking for. They
are set up to suggest many more things that we weren't looking for. This
can sometimes be helpful, but more often it can also be enormously
frustrating.
---Bob.
/************************************************/
/* Bob Hassett, Head Librarian */
/* Luther Jackson Middle School */
/* 3020 Gallows Road */
/* Falls Church, Virginia 22042 */
/* (703) 204-8133 */
/* Bob.Hassett@fcps.edu */
/************************************************/
See you in the Library!
-----Original Message-----
From: School Library Media & Network Communications
[mailto:LM_NET@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of Barbara Allen
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 8:38 PM
To: LM_NET@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Dewey Decimal System eliminated in new Arizona library.
This may be of interest:
_http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0530nodewey0530
.html_
(http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0530nodewey0530
.html)
OMG!
Barbara Allen
Technical Coordinator
Library Services
Tucson Unified School District
Tucson, AZ
************************************** See what's free at
http://www.aol.com.
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