Interesting News From AZ where the new Gilbert library will be the first public library in the nation whose entire collection will be categorized without the Dewey Decimal Classification System, Maricopa County librarians say.
Instead, tens of thousands of books in the Perry Branch library will be shelved by topic, similar to the way bookstores arrange books. The demise of the century-old Dewey Decimal system is overdue, county librarians say: It’s just too confusing for people to hunt down books using those long strings of numbers and letters. Dewey essentially arranges books by topic and assigns call numbers for each book.
Spotted @ The Stuff.
Beat me to it!
You beat me by two minutes, Blake! *shakes fist*
It will definitely be interesting to see how this goes.
meh
I’m not attached to the DDC. I just don’t want to go through the agony of converting all my records over to something new.
So they are going to…
Arrange them by topic and then inside the topics arrange the related books. So the Civil War Books will be in History and then United States.
There will be a cooking section and inside that a section for Chinese, and French and perhaps inside French a section on low carb French?
Wow, what a great idea. I wonder why nobody thought of that before.
Well at least they will save money on spine labels.
I do have some questions:
How will they know where to put the books?
How will they be cataloged, will a OLS accept a null field for call number?
Do they really think they are the only PL who has ‘given up’ DDC? I can take you to a PL branch near me that uses LC.
Who wrote that article that is so lacking in information as to be useless? I recall from High School journalism: Who, What, Where, When and How. It seems how is missing.
As I Said at ‘Stuff…
Great, now the Book I can’t find at Borders I won’t be able to find at the library as well.
Re:As I Said at ‘Stuff…
Translated into English:
Re:So they are going to…
I’ve even heard of a library near me where the librarian is not using DDC or LC. But then, they aren’t updating the card catalog either so I think it may be laziness. But still, I doubt its the first and only.
All Public LIbraries Don’t Use Dewey
The statement that “the new Gilbert library will be the first public library in the nation whose entire collection will be categorized without the Dewey Decimal Classification System” is just wrong. It must be the heat that turns these people’s minds to mush.
14 months
After reviewing the literature I feel that they will return to the DDC within 12-14 months.
Anyone want to bet on this? 50 bucks to your favorite friends organization.
Re:14 months 🙂
I never take a bet I’m guaranteed to lose
I predict disastrous shelving/re-shelving debacles.
Next thing
They’ll be shelving by colour and size.
You have to wonder who, exactly, comes up with these wonderful ideas. Hmm…although, it would make shelving much easier–who cares where you put it if there are no numbers to guide you. Maybe I should try that in my library.
roflmao. Yeah, not happening.
s/
Re:14 months
Gulp… I agree with you on this one and only issue. Please in the future post comments like this with a few talking points and some out of context quotes arguing why this is the equivalant of librarians promoting pornography.
Though I do think there are lots of things we can steal from retail bookstores: lower shelving, better signage, staff picks, multiple displays, extensive shell tagging.
Re:14 months
“Though I do think there are lots of things we can steal from retail bookstores: lower shelving, better signage, staff picks, multiple displays, extensive shell tagging.”
And if they had bothered to steal just that and kept the DDC they could have had the best of both worlds.
More PR than Radical Change ?
I suspect the Death of Dewey line is pure PR – MCLD is highly centralized (disclosure: I interviewed for a job there, didn’t get it), and the county’s Polaris system will have the same metadata for a Perry item shelved as Arizona Plants as it will for the same item at another branch shelved as 581.63209 H668f.
In a sense, all they’re doing is dropping DDC from the spine labels and not being so anal about strict linear shelving by gimongous Cutter numbers. In another sense they’re mistaking the map for the territory.
DDC, LC, and even bookstore arrangements are librarians’ mind maps and not necessarily patrons’. It’s great not to expect patrons to adapt to our mental models, but replacing it with Borders’ system is a half-donkeyed solution. If they’re really radical, they’ll continue to adapt to their patrons ways of finding, browsing, wandering, etc. Otherwise, they’ll sink into insisting their patrons adapt to their Borders-Lite scheme until they cave and return to Dewey, partly or fully.
As for who wrote the article, it’s from our local fluff-laden daily, the AZ Republic. The content is mostly from a library district press release.
Re:All Public LIbraries Don’t Use Dewey
We desert dwellers would counter that the northern climes freeze your brains, but that would border on abusive, yes?
;-p
Anyway, in the case of the Maricopa County Library District’s proclamations of themselves as DDC-free pioneers, it’s neither the heat nor the excessive air conditioning, but the ugly intersection of PR and provincialism.
Re:14 months
Sorry it was late.
Where will they shelve the porno. I bet they won’t have any gun books.
As Clinton said “It depends on what the meaning of IS is.”
Better?
Was the Dewey too confusing for the illegals?
CDs and DVDs around here get filed the first letter of the title. It is just too labor intensive to do any better. But the Ds get intermixed Cs all the time. It gives reference something to do – finding the lost item.
No Surprise
The MCLD’s Director talked about this kind of change for the several years I worked there.