Eclecticology wrote:
The LC Classification does have many benefits, but it remains a subject based listing, and as such involves a great deal of subjectivity. Would a book of the correspondence between an American and a French novellist, for example, be included in the PQ or the PS class? An author with multiple interests would have his works all over the place. What's more some libraries are free to deviate from LC to meet the needs of their own particular conventions.
Of course, this is no argument for ISBN in preference to LC; it's only an argument for author/title. I think that LC is better if we can make it work.
The author/title approach probably remains the best basis.
My worry here is that this isn't very conducive to look up by computer, since the spelling can vary (not only foreign names, but prepositions and articles in the titles). If we have people look these up in the LC catalogue, then they might as well look up the LC number as well.
-- Toby