Dewey Decimation
June 1, 2007
Well, even though this was the topic of the day two days ago, I think it’s still worth writing about. When the new Perry branch of the Maricopa County Public Library, in Gilbert, AZ, opens next month, its collection will not be classified using the Dewey Decimal System. It won’t use the Library of Congress Classification System, either, or the Bliss Bibiliographic Classification, or the Universal Decimal Classification, or any of the other myriad traditional library classifications. Instead, books will be arranged into about 50 broad sections and smaller subsections, and will then be arranged alphabetically by author’s last name, much as books are arranged in many bookstores.
Some librarians, on mailing lists and blogs, have expressed some reservations over this venture, citing concerns that it will make things more difficult to find and shelve, and that there is simply no need, since Dewey organizes materials more or less by subject anyway. Others have praised it as a great, user-centered innovation.
There are two reasons I’m excited about the Maricopa Library’s experiment:
- It centers the library around the concept of browsing, a pursuit that is becoming increasingly scarce in the digital age. The central branch of the Vancouver Public Library stores materials in boxes, closed to the public, that are retrieved automatically by machines when users request them online. And a recent study by the Seattle Public Library found that a large majority of the people who use the central library come into the building only to pick up holds that they have requested online. Rick Prelinger talked about this recently on Radio Open Source: he described his library as a place “where you go and you’re surprised,” as opposed to a search engine, which helps you find what you’re looking for. “I’ve never been able to use a search engine and find serendipity,” he says. I think many libraries are striving to be better search engines, and I appreciate that the new library in Gilbert sounds like it’s trying to be a better library.
- It’s also a lesson that one size doesn’t have to fit all. When I read the article about the Prelinger Library in Harper’s last month, I thought, “they’re doing things public libraries could never do.” MCPL’s experiment is proving me very happily wrong. It makes me wonder — if libraries don’t have to use standard classification systems, what else could they be doing differently? How else can they provide their users with something unexpected? How else can they buck trends to tailor their services to their communities?
It will be interesting to see what happens when the Perry Library opens. It’s a risky venture, but one that may serve to challenge our perceptions of libraries and what is required of them.
June 5, 2007 at 1:26 am
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June 9, 2007 at 9:34 pm
It sounds a lot like the King County browsing branch at Crossroads mall in Bellevue, which is worth checking out as you ponder the mysteries of arrangement. I’d like to see the Mariposa collection, but I think I agree with Svenonius about the improved serendipity in an ordered collection. If nothing else, it’s easier to find a chunk of books that are all about, say, cars, then one book about cars author unknown in a shelf with the broad subject of transportation. It works for fiction because fiction is author name driven and almost impossible to categorize by subject. I wonder if it works for non-fiction. I’ve rarely attempted to find non-fiction in a bookstore. I’ll try that.
June 18, 2007 at 9:57 am
How finely one want’s to divide knowlege into depends largely on how many books one has on a particular field. If you only have 10 books on the American Civil War, there’s little point to having a separte classification for each one. The longer call numbers only add confusion. Many libraries truncate the Dewey call #s available for just that reason. If, however, you have an entire aisle devoted to the subject, somebody looking for material on the battle between the Monitor and the Virginia would probably be better served by a finer classification. There’s no surprise that LC has created a VERY fine classification scheme.
June 19, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Jim, good point. I think that’s a good example of why it’s good for libraries to be able to tailor their classification and shelving systems for their own users and collections.
July 17, 2007 at 8:23 am
This (BISAC) system works well for bookstores because they do not generally grow in size nor do they care about archiving.
They are only interested in selling books and moving merchandise.
I suspect that this library will need to constantly weed their collection and keep the relatively the same number of books in the collection.
If they allow their collection to constantly grow, this system of favoring material “colocation” over “location” will eventually break under its own weight.
I suspect in about 10 years the library will either be completely confusing with so many “subcategories” they might have well used a Classification Scheme that already exists.
In Short - They are re-inventing the wheel