Ray Saintonge wrote:
Library science has indeed invented numerous schemes. Any such scheme designed for general application is as good as its competitors. Each developped independently to address the priorities of the originating library. Any of them may thus be validly criticized for its nationalist tendencies.
I think you are wrong here, but I wish I was more certain of my case. I'm not a librarian. I'm just fond of observing this German-American cultural clash from some distance (from Sweden).
In the field of digital libraries, there is a subculture that likes to discuss "thesauri and ontologies", especially bordering on the "semantic web" subculture. It seems to me that most people in the thesauri and ontologies subculture are from Germany and have some kind of German library science background. I'm talking about stuff like http://www.ecdl2003.org/ecdl.tutorials.html#tutorial4 and http://www.jcdl2004.org/tutorials.htm#t2a
U.S. libraries have the Dewey Decimal system for classification and other countries have other systems. These systems are colored by the time and country where they were created. So far you are right. But it seems to me that perhaps German library science scholars have gone deeper into making more of a science of this part of library science. Instead of learning, using and teaching the system they have, German library scientists discuss how best to design such category systems. I've heard them dismiss Yahoo's and Dmoz' category trees as naive creations of people who don't know the basics of library science.
I think this is what is happening on wikide-l and I'm glad that we have library scientists there.
Problematisieren -- the German word for making a problem out of something, to see problems (worthy of a deeper discussion) where others don't -- is the first step of a scientific approach.
I only speak Swedish, English and German, and this reduces my perspectives. Perhaps Chinese, Russian or French library scientists have totally different approaches that I should take into account.