In
response to a post about Metis on the ALSC blog, some commenters argued that we were
mistaken in being concerned about our students understanding the way that Dewey
worked, and that all that mattered essentially was that one could search for
items in the online catalog, obtain the call numbers and then locate the items
on the shelves. That got me thinking. Most of our work in this area has been in
relation to elementary age children, but these statements seemed to go beyond
that to the heart of the subject classification process itself.
As my
colleague Tali pointed out, if all you need from shelf order is a code that you
can locate on the shelf, what is the point of an elaborate classification
system? One might as well put books in accession number order. It would
certainly save a whole lot of trouble.
There
must be a reason why subject order was chosen by Dewey to organize the physical
collection. Amazingly enough, I found the first edition of Dewey (1876) on
Project Gutenberg. I thought he might explain why he chose subject order, but
in his introduction he seems concerned mainly with the internal order of his
system and the use of decimals. It seems as though the prevailing system at the
time was one in which there was a fixed location on the shelves for each item,
which would not change as the collection grew. One of Dewey's innovations was relative
location, in which items were placed in relation to each other and might move
to different shelves as the collection grew. He discusses these issues, but
more or less assumes the validity of subject order.
So what
is the point of a shelving system arranged by subject? A.C. Foskett, whose textbook
(The Subject Approach to Information)
I used in library school, has this to say:
"There
will be many occasions when readers will approach the collection without any
particular need in mind but wishing instead to be able to select items at
random. To help in this situation, our system should permit browsing; a reader
should be able to follow a casual train of thought as well as a planned search.” (London: Library Association,
1996; 5th ed., pg. 26)
Later in
the same book he asks, "Why is classified shelf arrangement helpful?"
and answers: "There are two
important reasons. The first is to satisfy the browsing function; readers like
to wander round the shelves and find books which attract them." (pg. 213)
Similarly,
Robert M. Losee of the UNC Chapel Hill Library School writes that "the
classification system essentially supplies a browsing path from one documents
to another." (“How to study classification
systems and their appropriateness for individual institutions.” In Classification: Options and Opportunities, ed. Alan R. Thomas.
Binghamton, NY: Haworth, 1995, pg. 45)
So if we
acknowledge that the reason for a subject-based shelving system is to permit
browsing, we then surely have to ask the next question:
What kind
of subject-based classification system is going to encourage the users of my
library to browse productively so that they are led to books which are of
interest to them? We think that this is a question worth asking and trying to
answer, rather than submitting to the monopolistic dominance of Dewey as a
supposed one-size-fits-all system.
The
question puts users at the center of the issue, and keeps them there. Ultimately,
that is the essential thing.
