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> Dewey Decimal System has only one (often-misunderstood) task: organizing bookshelf space. It does not have a task of classifying world information. How is th

> Dewey Decimal System has only one (often-misunderstood) task: organizing bookshelf space. It does not have a task of classifying world information. How is this distinct from organizing world information? If the goal is to shelve books in a way that adds value to the information-seeker, you have to arrange them according to some definition of similarity. That decision about what makes one thing similar to another encodes a view of the world.

TheCoelacanth 5y ago
The physical shelves in a library only serve a single, small geographic area, not the whole world.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  inter-library loans beg to disagree.
  - remexre 5y ago
    Does the shelving system of the library that owns the book matter to the library requesting it?
    - StringyBob 5y ago
      Perhaps only in that books are sometimes lost for years due to being put back in the wrong place! ‘Defragmenting’ the shelf space in a public library is a long and painful task, both for when there is a lack of room and for when things get out of order!
      - paulmd 5y ago
        has anyone considered adding a series of color bands to the labels for coarse/medium/fine grained placement information? For example "coarse" is nonfiction, "medium" is travel, and "fine" is Bermuda, or whatever. If you see a book with a red label in the blue section, or whatever, you know it's misplaced. If the labels are placed on the book at a similar location, then any book that is out of its proper would be significantly more obvious without having to resort to reading the label of every single book. Of course the techie solution would be to barcode every book and then have a robot on each shelf that scans the barcodes after hours...
        numpad0 5y ago
        Books come in all sizes and shapes, so scanning that color coded labels is still going to be a pain...
        paulmd 5y ago
        index them from the bottom of the book spine - if they're always 0.5" off the bottom of the shelf, it doesn't matter how tall the book is.
        a_e_k 5y ago
        I've usually seen this done with colored dot stickers affixed near to or on the library label on the spine of the book.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    ILL is a distribution, not a storage, mechanism. The DDS codes subject to shelf location. For a given library, materials selection is largely relevant to its own interests, and in many cases, location and local culture have a strong influence over that. (As I've discussed in an earlier comment, DDS is not the only shelving system used, though it's a commonly encountered one in the US, and serves as a basis for numerous others. There are also non-subject based shelving systems, though those are typically not publically-accessed.)
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      > The physical shelves in a library only serve a single, small geographic area, not the whole world What part of that sentence is not contradicted by inter-library loans? The books come off the shelves, and must be found there. They serve a wide geographic area, sometimes even the whole world (my mother was a librarian at several very specialized libraries and they participated in both receiving and giving loans involving other libraries around the world. It is true that the physical shelves in a library in (say) Germany will not be organized using DDS, but it remains true that the physical shelves can serve a wide geographic area. And this is not even to comment on those specialized libraries that people will travel from around the world to visit. Same physical shelves, world-wide service area. These can include libraries focused on individuals (famous historical figures, for example), or academic libraries with particularly rich holdings in certain areas, or libraries that just happen to have the only instance of a set of books/documents.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) is not a special-holdings cataloguing system. It is not even an academic holdings cataloguing system (in the US the Library of Congress Classification System, LCSS, is overwhelmingly used for this). DDC is used, in the majority of cases, for public libraries, serving local communities, in the US. The fact that DDC was developed at an academic library (Amherst College Library) doesn't refute this --- origin stories are not present-use stories, and Amherst have largely converted to the LCCS (see: https://www.amherst.edu/library/find/finditfrost/call-numbers https://www.amherst.edu/library/find/finditfrost/call-number... https://www.amherst.edu/library/find/finditfrost#tab-44437 https://www.amherst.edu/library/find/finditfrost#tab-44437). The LCCS, though influenced by DCC, is distinct. It still reflects a US-centrism, though with different emphasis. History of the Americas occupies two of the twenty alphabetic major classifications, and each of political science, law, education, agriculture, technology, military, and (separately) navel science, has its own major classification, reflecting the interests of a government ... and that government's library shelving concerns. Specialised libraries rarely use DCC in my experience. Medical libraries often use their own specific classification, and academic libraries in the US as noted above typically use LCCS, though some retain DCC or their own ideosyncratic classifications (both are generally being phased out for LCCS). For the University of California, an academic library with a strong inter-campus ILL programme, local circulaty exceeds ILL within the multicampus system by over an order of magnitude (1.6 million vs. 135k https://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/about/facts-and-figures https://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/about/facts-and...). For a local public library with few exceptional holdings, ILL circulation is likely a far smaller fraction of circulation. (Some have regional lending arrangements with peer libraries, independent of ILL. This still remains a small fraction of total circulation.) Much use of materials is within the library itself, captured only (if at all) in reshelving statistics, though those are hard to find. (I used the UC library system only because it's among the few that have available statistics.) The point remains that the principle focus of a cataloguing system is for local use and management of a bibliographic collection. ILL happens to be an incidental and compatible use. It is not of itself a major factor in classification system development. If you have any substantive argument to the contrary, I'd be happy to hear it. You've not yet made one.
- perilunar 5y ago
  and only one type of media: books
quantified 5y ago
We can doubt that the goal is to add value, and think it is simply to give some top-down structure that makes sense to the people using it. I admit that when I went into the stacks to find the book I was looking tor, browsing around on nearby shelves often led to additional good finds. These were topologically near. I think that would be the case for most good grouping schemes, though the choices may change. Times have changes, the things that make sense have changed in various ways. At least it still organizes shelves.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"How is this distinct from organizing world information?" Information has more dimensions than a bookshelf does?
dredmorbius 5y ago
There's no inherent need to arrange books by similarity, and there are numerous library systems that don't. (Most have "closed stacks", where patrons submit requests for materials.) The only requirement is that books be retrievable on request and can be returned to their assigned location when re-shelved. A book can occupy only one physical space at one time. If it has an assigned shelf location for storage and retrieval, it can have only one such location. The Dewey Decimal Classification assigns physical location by assigned subject, for better or worse. There's no essential reason to do this, and there are libraries which assign storage location by arbitrary identifiers, by size (this also tends to happen with DDS-based libraries, where there are specific "oversized" shelving sections, as well as storage for specific media types: maps, photographs, other graphic media (typically large-format), audio, video, software, and data. For information storage, your storage subsystem (spinning rust, SSD, tape, cloud, CDROM / DVD archive, etched crystal, whaevs) handles the physical storage location element. A filesystem, if it exists, is already a layer of abstraction over that, and is already freed of many of the limitations of physical storage, though largely as a matter of convention and convenience we tend to act as if those still exist, e.g., a file exists in one and only one directory and that directories are hierarchically organised. Both are typical but not inherently necessary. Tag-based classification drops yet another level of abstraction on top of the filesystem. Problems with tags emerge in part from their very flexibility. It's possible to apply any given tag to any given work. Informal tagging systems, or "folksonomies", tend to be highly idiosyncratic, inconsistent, redundant, repetitous, and frequently break out in pain points with time. Looking at this question myself, I see benefit in: - Reasonably structured metadata. If you ever want to start a riot amongst librarians, declare your metadata schema as "reasonably structured". That said, author/creator, title, creation date(s), publisher, and some attempt at topic or subject classification will likely be useful. Checksums, size, and fingerprints (say, specfied ngram structures) might also be useful. See "Dublin Core" for an example which has both adherants and critics. For any possible set of metadata, you will all but certainly be able to find exceptions or inapplicability. - "Search is identity". That is, any given set of tags or metadata might be considered a search, and any search will have one of three possible results: 0 matches (failure), 1 match (an identity search), or > 1 match (a result set). How many more than one has some reflection on how useful that result set is. In the same sense that 33 bits will identify any individual person on Earth, you'd need about 27 bits to identify any of the roughly 150 million published works. If your universe is the larger set of recorded but not published works, you'll need to expand your bits accordingly. (A recent estimate I've seen is that for every person on Earth, there's about 1.7 MB/s of data being recorded presently.) - Names themselves are largely conventions. This might apply to any of the various names associated with a book: its title, its author, its publisher, the publication country or city, the date (and calendar system) associated with with publication, traditions, disciplines, educational institutions, references, etc., associated with it. All of these can and do change. (Quick: what are the names by which Plato, Avicenna, George Sand, Mark Twain, St. Petersburg, New York, Mumbai, and the Wilson School of Government are known by?) Good names are useful in that they are useful conventions and are commonly understood when received by others.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
The parent poster said exactly how it was different: "an average library has similar book-width for both topics." Although of course what was really meant was that American libraries at the time of Thomas Dewey had similar book-width for both topics.
- maratc 5y ago
  Of course you're right and I meant American Public libraries; I imagine Chabad-Lubavitch Library would probably lead to a different system. And the time I was referring was the time of Melvil Dewey, although I imagine not much would have changed by Thomas Dewey's time :)
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    damn, that is like the 6th time I have made that mistake (that I'm aware of).
maratc 5y ago
> How is this distinct from organizing world information? Any practical classification system starts with corpus at hand, and tries to organize that. Any idealistic classification system that aspires to be "complete" (at least in theory) starts with theoretically possible corpus, and tries to organize that. For example, if you want to classify the pictures you have in your personal photo library, it would make sense to have e.g. a folder named "2020", for the pictures you've made that year. But it would not make sense to have a folder named "1900", as it's unlikely you made any photos then. This is a practical classification. But if you want to classify all of the world's photos, you may need to start with a folder named "1826" to hold the View from the Window at Le Gras[1]. Or maybe earlier, for the paintings. That's a theoretical classification. DDS is a practical classification, and as such, it started with the corpus at hand — whatever public libraries in the USA had at Dewey's time. This is how it's "distinct from organizing world information". ————— [1]: It's not clear if the photo was taken in 1826 or 1827, so our theoretical classification would need to account for that, or for photos where the year is unknown, or estimated, etc.

TheCoelacanth 5y ago

The physical shelves in a library only serve a single, small geographic area, not the whole world.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
inter-library loans beg to disagree.
- remexre 5y ago
  Does the shelving system of the library that owns the book matter to the library requesting it?
  - StringyBob 5y ago
    Perhaps only in that books are sometimes lost for years due to being put back in the wrong place! ‘Defragmenting’ the shelf space in a public library is a long and painful task, both for when there is a lack of room and for when things get out of order!
    - paulmd 5y ago
      has anyone considered adding a series of color bands to the labels for coarse/medium/fine grained placement information? For example "coarse" is nonfiction, "medium" is travel, and "fine" is Bermuda, or whatever. If you see a book with a red label in the blue section, or whatever, you know it's misplaced. If the labels are placed on the book at a similar location, then any book that is out of its proper would be significantly more obvious without having to resort to reading the label of every single book. Of course the techie solution would be to barcode every book and then have a robot on each shelf that scans the barcodes after hours...
      - numpad0 5y ago
        Books come in all sizes and shapes, so scanning that color coded labels is still going to be a pain...
        paulmd 5y ago
        index them from the bottom of the book spine - if they're always 0.5" off the bottom of the shelf, it doesn't matter how tall the book is.
      - a_e_k 5y ago
        I've usually seen this done with colored dot stickers affixed near to or on the library label on the spine of the book.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  ILL is a distribution, not a storage, mechanism. The DDS codes subject to shelf location. For a given library, materials selection is largely relevant to its own interests, and in many cases, location and local culture have a strong influence over that. (As I've discussed in an earlier comment, DDS is not the only shelving system used, though it's a commonly encountered one in the US, and serves as a basis for numerous others. There are also non-subject based shelving systems, though those are typically not publically-accessed.)
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > The physical shelves in a library only serve a single, small geographic area, not the whole world What part of that sentence is not contradicted by inter-library loans? The books come off the shelves, and must be found there. They serve a wide geographic area, sometimes even the whole world (my mother was a librarian at several very specialized libraries and they participated in both receiving and giving loans involving other libraries around the world. It is true that the physical shelves in a library in (say) Germany will not be organized using DDS, but it remains true that the physical shelves can serve a wide geographic area. And this is not even to comment on those specialized libraries that people will travel from around the world to visit. Same physical shelves, world-wide service area. These can include libraries focused on individuals (famous historical figures, for example), or academic libraries with particularly rich holdings in certain areas, or libraries that just happen to have the only instance of a set of books/documents.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) is not a special-holdings cataloguing system. It is not even an academic holdings cataloguing system (in the US the Library of Congress Classification System, LCSS, is overwhelmingly used for this). DDC is used, in the majority of cases, for public libraries, serving local communities, in the US. The fact that DDC was developed at an academic library (Amherst College Library) doesn't refute this --- origin stories are not present-use stories, and Amherst have largely converted to the LCCS (see: https://www.amherst.edu/library/find/finditfrost/call-numbers https://www.amherst.edu/library/find/finditfrost/call-number... https://www.amherst.edu/library/find/finditfrost#tab-44437 https://www.amherst.edu/library/find/finditfrost#tab-44437). The LCCS, though influenced by DCC, is distinct. It still reflects a US-centrism, though with different emphasis. History of the Americas occupies two of the twenty alphabetic major classifications, and each of political science, law, education, agriculture, technology, military, and (separately) navel science, has its own major classification, reflecting the interests of a government ... and that government's library shelving concerns. Specialised libraries rarely use DCC in my experience. Medical libraries often use their own specific classification, and academic libraries in the US as noted above typically use LCCS, though some retain DCC or their own ideosyncratic classifications (both are generally being phased out for LCCS). For the University of California, an academic library with a strong inter-campus ILL programme, local circulaty exceeds ILL within the multicampus system by over an order of magnitude (1.6 million vs. 135k https://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/about/facts-and-figures https://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/about/facts-and...). For a local public library with few exceptional holdings, ILL circulation is likely a far smaller fraction of circulation. (Some have regional lending arrangements with peer libraries, independent of ILL. This still remains a small fraction of total circulation.) Much use of materials is within the library itself, captured only (if at all) in reshelving statistics, though those are hard to find. (I used the UC library system only because it's among the few that have available statistics.) The point remains that the principle focus of a cataloguing system is for local use and management of a bibliographic collection. ILL happens to be an incidental and compatible use. It is not of itself a major factor in classification system development. If you have any substantive argument to the contrary, I'd be happy to hear it. You've not yet made one.
perilunar 5y ago
and only one type of media: books

quantified 5y ago

We can doubt that the goal is to add value, and think it is simply to give some top-down structure that makes sense to the people using it. I admit that when I went into the stacks to find the book I was looking tor, browsing around on nearby shelves often led to additional good finds. These were topologically near. I think that would be the case for most good grouping schemes, though the choices may change. Times have changes, the things that make sense have changed in various ways. At least it still organizes shelves.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"How is this distinct from organizing world information?" Information has more dimensions than a bookshelf does?

dredmorbius 5y ago

There's no inherent need to arrange books by similarity, and there are numerous library systems that don't. (Most have "closed stacks", where patrons submit requests for materials.) The only requirement is that books be retrievable on request and can be returned to their assigned location when re-shelved. A book can occupy only one physical space at one time. If it has an assigned shelf location for storage and retrieval, it can have only one such location. The Dewey Decimal Classification assigns physical location by assigned subject, for better or worse. There's no essential reason to do this, and there are libraries which assign storage location by arbitrary identifiers, by size (this also tends to happen with DDS-based libraries, where there are specific "oversized" shelving sections, as well as storage for specific media types: maps, photographs, other graphic media (typically large-format), audio, video, software, and data. For information storage, your storage subsystem (spinning rust, SSD, tape, cloud, CDROM / DVD archive, etched crystal, whaevs) handles the physical storage location element. A filesystem, if it exists, is already a layer of abstraction over that, and is already freed of many of the limitations of physical storage, though largely as a matter of convention and convenience we tend to act as if those still exist, e.g., a file exists in one and only one directory and that directories are hierarchically organised. Both are typical but not inherently necessary. Tag-based classification drops yet another level of abstraction on top of the filesystem. Problems with tags emerge in part from their very flexibility. It's possible to apply any given tag to any given work. Informal tagging systems, or "folksonomies", tend to be highly idiosyncratic, inconsistent, redundant, repetitous, and frequently break out in pain points with time. Looking at this question myself, I see benefit in: - Reasonably structured metadata. If you ever want to start a riot amongst librarians, declare your metadata schema as "reasonably structured". That said, author/creator, title, creation date(s), publisher, and some attempt at topic or subject classification will likely be useful. Checksums, size, and fingerprints (say, specfied ngram structures) might also be useful. See "Dublin Core" for an example which has both adherants and critics. For any possible set of metadata, you will all but certainly be able to find exceptions or inapplicability. - "Search is identity". That is, any given set of tags or metadata might be considered a search, and any search will have one of three possible results: 0 matches (failure), 1 match (an identity search), or > 1 match (a result set). How many more than one has some reflection on how useful that result set is. In the same sense that 33 bits will identify any individual person on Earth, you'd need about 27 bits to identify any of the roughly 150 million published works. If your universe is the larger set of recorded but not published works, you'll need to expand your bits accordingly. (A recent estimate I've seen is that for every person on Earth, there's about 1.7 MB/s of data being recorded presently.) - Names themselves are largely conventions. This might apply to any of the various names associated with a book: its title, its author, its publisher, the publication country or city, the date (and calendar system) associated with with publication, traditions, disciplines, educational institutions, references, etc., associated with it. All of these can and do change. (Quick: what are the names by which Plato, Avicenna, George Sand, Mark Twain, St. Petersburg, New York, Mumbai, and the Wilson School of Government are known by?) Good names are useful in that they are useful conventions and are commonly understood when received by others.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

The parent poster said exactly how it was different: "an average library has similar book-width for both topics." Although of course what was really meant was that American libraries at the time of Thomas Dewey had similar book-width for both topics.

maratc 5y ago
Of course you're right and I meant American Public libraries; I imagine Chabad-Lubavitch Library would probably lead to a different system. And the time I was referring was the time of Melvil Dewey, although I imagine not much would have changed by Thomas Dewey's time :)
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  damn, that is like the 6th time I have made that mistake (that I'm aware of).

maratc 5y ago

> How is this distinct from organizing world information? Any practical classification system starts with corpus at hand, and tries to organize that. Any idealistic classification system that aspires to be "complete" (at least in theory) starts with theoretically possible corpus, and tries to organize that. For example, if you want to classify the pictures you have in your personal photo library, it would make sense to have e.g. a folder named "2020", for the pictures you've made that year. But it would not make sense to have a folder named "1900", as it's unlikely you made any photos then. This is a practical classification. But if you want to classify all of the world's photos, you may need to start with a folder named "1826" to hold the View from the Window at Le Gras[1]. Or maybe earlier, for the paintings. That's a theoretical classification. DDS is a practical classification, and as such, it started with the corpus at hand — whatever public libraries in the USA had at Dewey's time. This is how it's "distinct from organizing world information". ————— [1]: It's not clear if the photo was taken in 1826 or 1827, so our theoretical classification would need to account for that, or for photos where the year is unknown, or estimated, etc.