On Jul 1, 2005, at 11:46 AM, Geoff Burling wrote:
In fact, the research of book cataloging systems was a dead science until Yahoo came along some ten years ago; one friend who is a book cataloging geek (he actually tried to convince me to let him assign catalog numbers based on his own scheme to my personal library), sadly remarked no new research had been done since the 1930s. It's a case that in the English-speaking world, both the Dewey or LC systems are "good enough" for their needs. (Those that don't use one of these either follow a home-brewed system created in the 19th century, or, as in the case of the British Library -- avoid the issue of cataloging, & simply assign a shelf number to their books.) And migrating to a new system is an unnecessary cost most libraries -- which are perennially short on funds -- want to avoid.
I've been in libraries that organized their books by date of publishing. While I'm sure that made their lives easier as new books simply got added to the newest set of shelves, it made finding any related books a pain. There's definitely some poorly thought out systems out there still because no one has the funds or motivation to do a massive reorganization.
Laura