The DDC is Killing our Libraries

Anonymous says:

While the DDC may not be the
While the DDC may not be the world’s easiest system to understand, it is better than finding a book on the shelf by its color or size, isn’t it? Aren’t those two of the many ways of shelving and/or finding books that preceded DDC? My guess is that Dewey’s system was such a vast improvement over what came before that librarians AND regular people too were euphoric at the wonder of it and put up with its peculiarities, if they even noticed them in the scaled down world in which they lived at the time. In all that I’ve read re: cataloging, no where do I remember seeing anything that suggested that DDC was the immutable end-all, be-all to the problem. Given Dewey’s penchant for condensing words to the fewest letters possible, for example, as one of his most notorious peculiatiries, I daresay he would already have amended the existing DDC, if had not already come out with a new system altogether.

As to Apple, remember that if it can’t entertain us from the instant we step away from the starting block, it probably isn’t an Apple product. Oh, yes, and by the way, you can do work on an Apple product as well, but don’t let that get in the way of you having fun first and foremost … tra-la, tra-la.

I am a teacher-librarian (sorry, AASL, I will never abandon my hard-earned right to call myself as teacher as you would like me to do), and it is not impossible to teach DDC to kids, as long as you like and understand it first. For most LT’s who have trouble getting it across, in my experience at least, the problem lies in the fact that they are not DDC-friendly librarians or that they are not DDC-friendly teachers; one place or the other, there is dislike and resistance to the system itself.

For their part, kids are fine with it if you base the instruction on the model of a known classification system — baseball cards, kinds of candy at a candy store or food at the grocery store. Heck, science teachers teach classification systems — class, phylum, etc. — and nobody complains. But translate the descriptor words into digits and watch out! With science teachers, it’s 1,000x worse; they use latin words where we use numbers, but do you hear anybody screaming?

And for those of you who are objecting to the DDC, you know, of course, that it is essentially a database, one that ran sans a computer for years! And do you have any idea how many databases you use every day that work on many of the same principles as the DDC? Made travel arrangements today and bought tickets, did you? You essentially used the DDC; Continent: North America (becomes a 9); country: U.S. (becomes a 7); state: New York (becomes a 9 in the search string), and so forth in Southwest Air’s locations database, just like book on New York state history becomes 979 in the DDC. Now was that so hard, really?