On 30/06/05, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com 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?
Quite often, this will be done by the publisher (certainly in my experience with school libraries), who will put a Dewey number on the copyrights page. Not exactly neutral, but that's the way it seems to be done as far as I can tell.
This is part of the CIP process - cataloguing-in-print. Basically, a proof copy of the book is catalogued to a basic standard, and this gets put on the flyleaf; it means that you can open a book and create a catalogue record without having to go to the effort of cataloguing it.
Classification numbers generally get assigned at this stage, but they're often inaccurate (especially for more abtruse subjects), and libraries often reclassify from scratch on receipt. This I wouldn't put too much faith in. The cataloguer is quite often not the publisher - in the US, it's often the Library of Congress. (Look carefully, you'll see "The Library of Congress has catalogued the X edition as follows: ...")