Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Technology & Cataloging
Many of our readers are probably familiar with the Dewey Decimal System, the system of cataloging library books created by Melvil Dewey in the 19th century. Most public libraries, and some academic and school libraries, use this system to this day. Well, Tim Spalding, the founder of LibraryThing, thinks we need a new system. He's created an open source project, called The Open Source Classification, and has opened it to librarians all over the world to help create this new classification scheme. We've seen that collaboration online can do some extraordinary things -- witness the rise of Wikipedia and social networking. Can we, together, oust Dewey after all these years? I'm not sure. I grew up in libraries and have been memorizing Dewey numbers since I was a small child, so part of me resists this idea. The other part of me, who's been a cataloger and a public services librarian, realizes that Dewey doesn't always work when it comes to co-location and finding the materials you want when you want them. I wonder if there's a compromise? Or will libraries start coming up with their own classification schemes? I wouldn't mind writing my own classification scheme just for TPL! Keep watching for more info about this exciting trend. Well, it might be exciting to me and boring to you, but it'll definitely affect you, one way or another!
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Tags are a great trend, and are so much more sensible than some of the esoteric subject headings used by libraries ("cookery" anyone?). The problem is that they're best used online, where there's no limit to the number of links.
For example, I can put something on a single server online, but place hyperlinks from a dozen different tags. There's no physical limit. Books, on the other hand, are material items and can only be held in one place. Tags could be great tools to identify books, but at the end of the day something like the good old Dewey system has to come into play to actually house the book on a shelf.
In a weird way, that's a strength of an arcane and esoteric system: there's less confusion about the number of places an individual item might fit in.
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