On 01/07/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@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, 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. (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. There are also specialised ones - I've experience of NLM, the National Library of Medicine scheme, but there's plenty others - for specialised subfields. Not a dead area, just one where the big breakthroughs seem to have been made <g>
UDC's certainly common enough, and viewed as standard enough, that I was taught it alongside Dewey, for what that's worth.