Now, where does this go?

Traditionally, books are the main resource in a library's collection. Where I work, the Amon Carter Museum Library, where I work is considered a small library, but it has about 50,000 books, not to mention the library's archive and map holdings. As I am sure you realize, good reader, this provides a thorny problem for the librarian - how to classify and organize those books into some sort of logical order. Not only so you can find them on the shelf, but also so that the patron can browse books in a certain area and discover other works they might find interesting.

The argument as to how to classify and organize books in a library is as old as libraries themselves. The earliest libraries known, in the fertile crescent, had some form of library classification. As time moved on and the amount of information in libraries increased exponentially, two classification systems became widespread in the US: Dewey Decimal, and Library of Congress.

Most people are familiar with the Dewey Decimal System. For example, one of my favorite books, Master of the Senate, by Robert Caro, could have two call numbers :
973.923/092 (This would place the book in Social Sciences)
or
328.73/092 B 21 (This would place the book in History)
depending on if you use the exact call number that is in the Library of Congress record, and you would also have to determine if you wanted it in Social Sciences or History. Dewey Decimal is one of the oldest, and is also widely used. My school library used this classification, and it worked pretty well. Of course, you can see a problem developing - that this book would go into Social Sciences or History - but what if someone was looking for biographies - there is no "class" for that area. One large library that uses this system is the Seattle Public Library - one of the coolest main libraries in the country. This link will tell you all about their building - and notice the changeable Dewey numbers in the floor!

As I mentioned, the other widely used classification system is the Library of Congress Classification. As I have mentioned before, the Library of Congress (LoC) is the progenitor of all things library related in the US. So many libraries follow what the LoC does, simply because of the size, and the perceived quality of the work of the LoC. The Amon Carter Library uses the LoC system, and it works very well. Generally, I think, the LoC scheme is better at classifying than the Dewey system - and I am surprised at the number of libraries still using Dewey. To give you an example, let's look again at Master of the Senate in the LoC scheme:
E847 .C34 1982 vol. 3
Just one call number, and we can gather from that call number that the book falls into the History of America (E), Johnson's Administrations (847) That the last name of the author starts with a C, and that the original volume in this series was published in 1982, but this is the third volume in that series. Personally I prefer the LoC scheme, as it is much more descriptive and definite in its scheme.

By no means, though are Dewey and Library of Congress the only methods of book classification. Some bookstores have chosen, as a design experiment, to sort books by their spine colors. Neat looking, but a nightmare to browse or find any books! Also, an artist has combined the color idea with an actual classification system - great idea, but what happens when the covers with the call numbers on them are lost?

What got me thinking about all of this, was this article, in which a library system has decided to abandon Dewey for classification, but did not switch to LoC, but to another, self created WordThink classification system. The point I am trying to get across here, dear reader, is that even though the library world seems very traditional and set in its ways, it truly is dynamic and creative - just like the information we help to classify and organize.

- Jason Dean