classification at home

[calimac]

In a f'locked post, a correspondent queried readers as to their preference in classifications for a home library: Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress, Universal Decimal, or something else? Part of my response:

First off, for something the size of a home library, even a big one, there is in practice no difference between DDC and UDC. So don't worry about that.

LCC's easier introduction of new subjects really just means that there's a more flexible notation space. So unless you plan to put spine labels on your books, that's nothing to worry about either. Both systems cover the full range of knowledge, and the practical questions are:

1) The ease of finding and applying the numbers; 2) The order of the books on the shelves.

Re 1): These days many commercially published books have cataloging info on the verso of the title page, including LC's assignment of both LCC and DDC numbers. And for those that don't, you can easily find them in LC's catalog. Advantage LC: LC hasn't always applied DDC, so older books won't have this. Advantage either: But you can look them up in other libraries' online catalogs too. Advantage DDC: It's shorter and less technical (outside of the literature fields, which are a bear), and can be and has been abridged (which LCC cannot, the flip side of the more flexible notation space), so it's much easier to use if you want to apply the numbers yourself.

Re 2): The big question here is, what are you going to do with fiction? Neither system is very comfortable with it, and neither makes any provision for separating genres. In practice, most LCC libraries integrate the fiction (and poetry & drama) with non-fiction about literature, while most DDC libraries put fiction outside the classification altogether. But this is because LCC is used mostly by universities, where the people who want fiction are literature students, while DDC is used mostly in public libraries, where the people who want fiction are readers who want novels for pleasure.

If you integrate the fiction, the ordering is quite different. Both separate it first by nationality of the author and/or language written (using different orders). But after that they're different. LCC classes literature of a given country by time period, making no provision for difference between fiction and other forms of literature. DDC classes literature of a given country by form - poetry, drama, fiction, then essays & letters and whatnot - and provision for further subdivision by period is optional.

If you want your nonfiction to line up on your shelves with a logical succession of subjects pleasing to the eye, both systems are wonky, though LCC is slightly less so. For my own shelves, I use this one, which is more logical than either. I use the old system, not the revised one, which is faceted to within an inch of its life (and, so far as I last checked, still incomplete); it's 60 years old, to be true, but it's not difficult to find places for newer subjects in my library of 3000 non-fiction books.

Most people don't have a broad selection of non-fiction in their home libraries; they concentrate on subjects of particular interest to them. For them, I advise not worrying about classification at all: lump the books up by categories. Now, for sub-arrangement within these, advice from DDC or LCC may be useful, but probably not as useful for your personal preferences as you might think.

It can often be better to take all your books on, say, astronomy, and sort them by piles on the floor according to how they go together in your mind. Most likely the star-gazing books will be here, and the astrophysics books over there, and so on. It's really rather easier and more intuitive than trying to eke the same info out of a classification system.

Comments

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

Having worked in libraries using both - both as a staffer, and as a writer/scholar using the stuff on the shelf -- I admit I prefer the LC classifications. One of the things I liked was that scholarship and suppliments about a particular author could be cataloged to be shelved right beside that work. Or near it.

But I gave up trying to be systematic about my holdings. I've ended up with a "grouping" method.

For instance, I have one whole bookcase given over to Inklings - except that I include Dorothy Sayers in it (not the novels, because I have those in paperback in a different bookcase). And George Macdonald.

I have most of my writing/screenwriting books on a shelf of my desk's hutch. The rest, because I don't have shelf space for them, are in their own box in the closet.

Then elsewhere, I have all my copies of Ace Doubles science fiction together, but not in any particular order.

I keep thinking of putting my DVDs in some order, and going alphabetical by title -- except that I'd put all the James Bond movies under "Bond", and the Harry Potter movies in order of the story. And all of Hitchcock under "Hitchcock" and then alphabetized by title.

I just can't make them conform to a system. Some things I want closer to hand.

But I admire those who can do it.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

One of the things I liked was that scholarship and suppliments about a particular author could be cataloged to be shelved right beside that work. Or near it.

You can do that in Dewey. But it has to be by locally applied rules; it's not built into the classification.

The term for what you want to do with Inklings books and Hitchcock movies is "special collection". I do that too. My post on my bookshelf ordering should be forthcoming at some point.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

For a while I had all the Asimov in one bookcase. Didn't matter what the subject was. I even had them in publication order at one point, but then decided to keep series together and subjects together, as that made more sense.
My stuff when it is organized is usually by subject, series or author (depending on which is more important) and piled where ever they fit.
For those of you who don't know, the house is wall to wall to wall bookcases with random piles of books stuffed everywhere. Then there are the DVD shelves and boxes...
Did I mention the unicorns and action figures? Though most of those are boxed up now, we ran out of display places on top of the bookcases/piles of books.
Slowly putting the collection of books in LibraryThing, which will be fun once a larger amount of it gets entered.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The authors I keep all together regardless of subject are the Inklings and Le Guin. I have lots of Asimov but there are two clumps - SF and general science books - and others are scattered.

[stephan-laurent.livejournal.com]

One of my principal gripe about LC system is the contemptuous way with which it has forever treated my art and profession, dance. It has been stuck under G (for Geography, go figure), most particularly GV (ack, Recreation). Meanwhile, Music has its own top letter (M) and there is even a Fine Arts category (N). I couldhave seen dance placed under either one, but no... GV it is, GV forever. My guess is that the guy in charge of the Library of Congress detested dance (was he perhaps klutzy?) and obviously did not consider it an art form.
This said, I find DDC just weird and non-intuitive, so I'm glad the Butler University Library has switched to all-LC a long time ago. But I'm still insulted by the way my art has been treated.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

DDC also treats dance as a branch of recreation, with sports and games, as LCC does (in the 790s), but it has these advantages over LCC: that at least the 790s are considered art rather than LCC's anthropology [which is what G is, as much as geography], which puts the dance books in the same part of the library as the ones on music and visual arts; and also that if the 790s are a purdah, at least they're a performing arts purdah, as theater and film also go there. (LCC puts those in with literature.)

Both systems have a host of 19th-century biases, of which the most infamous is geographical. DDC, for instance, gives 10-number classes to each of American, British, Germanic (including Dutch & Scandinavian), French, Spanish/Portuguese, Italian, Latin, and Greek literature, while all other languages, including Russian and various Asian literatures, gets stuffed into the remaining 10-number chunk. All that really means, though, is that the numbers are longer. So the real question is: what is it adjacent to - DDC puts dance near theater and music, its allied arts, and LCC doesn't - and even more importantly, the internal organization of the subject.

[divertimento.livejournal.com]

Have you encountered any institution or personal library that exercised Ranganathan's Colon Classification? That sounded interesting to me a few years ago when, for a project at work for assigning categories to our documentation, I looked at various classification systems for inspiration.

I'm drawing a blank on some system that was related to Ranganathan's that facilitated assigning multiple classifications to a book (while being unambigious on the classification that accounted for its physical location in the library). Do you recall what that system might be?