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