LISNews: Librarian News

Steven writes "Why Dewey's Decimal System is prejudiced is a short piece that argues The DDC's aging value system shows the pernicious influence of reality. It says This highlights two ways our taxonomies are changing now that we're shaking off the physical and moving to the electronic. First, the physical world is so hard to change that a taxonomy that's offensive in its inherent values — and all taxonomies have values baked into them — may be worth maintaining simply because no taxonomy is worse than an offensive taxonomy. Second, the most important job of the new generation of librarians is to build into information objects sufficient metadata that any organization can create its own taxonomy."

MadTom writes

"Part of a series called "Hacking the Library", this installment further explores what the author, Kendall Grant Clark, calls "dijalog", or "the confluence and intertwingling of the digital and the analog" as it applies to library constructs. His main premise about libraries as both a social and physical space is:

by navigating through, that is, by cleverly inhabiting, a particular, highly regimented social space, you can identify, locate, and interact with objects -- born digital, born physical, or both -- that represent or constitute your very own culture, or cultures far removed in space and time from your own.

The article goes on to discuss ways to use library classifications schemes on your own collections

Read the full article
(XML.com, March 17, 2004)

rteeter writes: "Many of us may be geeks, but you have to be right sort of geek to appreciate this. Latin Place Names, as found in books published before 1801. Rare books geeks? History buffs? Anyway, I thought it was cool."

David P. Dillard writes "The old ways of finding information included much time in drawers of 3 X 5
cards called a library card catalog that indexed library collections by
author title and subject of owned publications and other materials. In
1984, a centennial exhibition was held for the huge card catalog of the
University of Pennsylvania Library. This historical record of the event
may be of interest.

Here Is The Text from the 1984 Exhibit
in Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of
Penn's Library Card Catalog
Text from a speech given by Sue Jacobson, March 1984, at the opening of
the exhibit -- Read More