[WikiEN-l] Re: Categories and NPOV: Libraries?

[Geoff Burling]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

> How do libraries handle it?
>
[snipping example]
>
> 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?
>
Based on conversation with a couple of friends who are librarians (one
with a degree from UC Berkeley), & from working in the college library
while I was at school, I understand cataloging books is a chore no one
wants to do from scratch: 99+% of the time, the Library of Congress (LC)
decision is adopted without a second thought because it's the lowest
cost solution to the problem -- & it supplies both the LC & Dewey
classifications.

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.

Geoff