On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Andrew Gray wrote:
On 01/07/05, Geoff Burling
<llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com> 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.
India uses Colon classification, which I believe is the 1930s system,
That's the one; my friend refers to it as the "cutting-edge" classification
system.
and I'm not sure you can really call UDC, the turn
of the century one,
"home-brewed" - it gets a lot of usage, international standard and
all, although in the English-speaking world it's a minor partner to
Dewey.
Hmm. I hadn't heard of UDC, & after reading the Wikipedia article, I
suspect I've probably been in a library that uses it, & assumed that
it was Dewey. (I confess that I don't look that closely at the catalog
numbers on the spine of the book, & could have easily confused the
two.)
(The two are, in many ways, similar; UDC is a bit
more
flexible, in general terms). And then there's Bliss, which is mildly
obscure and American, but does get some use.
Also read the Wikipedia article on that one. Sad to learn that the
home library ofits founder gave it up years ago.
[snip]
Not a dead area, just one where the big breakthroughs
seem
to have been made <g>
That's the ebb & flow of any discipline; I figure in library science
there is also the lack of any easy breakthroughs, & little or no
money to devote to reasearch. But I remember someone (either Kernighan
or Pike) once making the comment that research into Operating
Systems is in the same boat -- & probably for the same reasons.
Geoff