dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
Anyway, it seems to me that librarians must deal with this sort of thing all the time. And the many public libraries that use the Dewey Decimal system can't just fall back on the Library of Congress. Although perhaps there's some central authority that recommends Dewey classifications. But in any case, someone has to decide whether Velikovsky is science or science fiction. Who does? and how?
From my limited experience talking to librarians, and much less limited experience browsing libraries, the typical way it's done is to cross-reference under any categories that seem relevant, and shelve under the one that the author seemed to be aiming for. So if it's clearly intended to be a work of science-fiction, it'll be shelved there. If it's intended to be speculative science or something of that sort, it may be shelved under science.
They generally avoid some of the problems in this discussion because categories like "pseudoscience" don't exist---a book expounding a physics theory will be shelved under physics, and whether it's a good book by a Nobel Prize winner or a crappy book by a kook isn't the cataloging system's job to judge.
-Mark