On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Andrew Gray wrote:
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,
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