09 Books of a feather flock together...

Sometimes one can simply not decide whether a particular book should go here... or there. One of the problems with the Dewey scheme (and one suspects, the others too)  is that the same general topic occurs in different places with different nuances. Let’s take a simple and popular case: that of “Wildlife”. Sticking to the DDC “thousand” which are downloadable from the OCLC site, there’s 508 “Natural history”,  570 “Life sciences”, 577 “Ecology”, 578 “Natural history of organisms”, 581 “Specific topics in natural history”, then a whole series of numbers for botany and plants, 590 “Animals (Zoology)”, 591 again “Specific topics in natural history”, then a whole series for various groups of animals from invertebrates to vertebrates, culminating in 598 “Birds” and 599 “Mammals”. You’d think that’s all there is to it, but then unexpectedly under the 600s (Technology) we get 639 “Hunting, fishing & conservation”. Many of these categories, from DDC 22 (or 23), are new to me, as I have stuck to good old DDC 20. But I happen to know that under 639 there lurks (or used to lurk) 639.9, “Conservation”, which includes wildlife management, wildlife reserves, conservation of animals, plants, and so on. There’s also 799 “Fishing, hunting & shooting”, if not also 712 to 719 dealing with “Natural landscapes”.  Where would we put the book “Wildlife in India”, or “Wildlife of India”?

Falling back on our trusted ally, the Library of Congress www.loc.gov, I got 333.95/16/0954 (under Economics!) for books titled “Wildlife in India” and “Conserving wildlife in India”, M.Krishnan’s “The handbook of India’s wildlife” got 915.4/0453, which as we know is “Geography & travel”; “A chronicle of India’s wildlife” got 599.756/0954, which is “Mammals” with the Place added on; and Schaller’s famous “The deer and the tiger” was under 599.05 (“Mammals-ecology and behaviour”). And not a single entry for 639 yet, before the site froze on me.

Thus it’s clear that there can be many choices. Ultimately I fall back upon a simple common sense approach: when there are too many ambiguous different categories, I tend to group all my books which share a subject together, not worrying about strict rigour. As I said before, ‘Doing the Dewey’ tends to get dogmatic if carried too far. It’s more important to put the pitiful few books you have on a certain subject together, rather than have them sprinkled through your shelves in a devotion to Dewey doctrinalism. So I would choose one of the above categories, or at the most two, and bring together all my books place-wise. I chose “Ecology” (which used to be 574 but is now 577) for general books on nature, such as “Forests”, “Deserts”, and so on, and 639.9 for wildlife reserves, wildlife management (where the emphasis is on the applied technology rather than the theoretical models of ecology). Parallel to this, “Trees” goes under Botany, whereas “Forestry” as an applied technology goes under 634.9, next to “Agriculture” 630-633 and “Horticulture” 635. Books on specific groups like apes, tiger, dolphins, birds, go by their respective numbers under “Mammals”, “Birds” etc. I keep 333 for books which emphasise the economic aspects of conservation, such as Forest Economics, as well as Participatory or Joint Management.

There are many groups with problems like these, and in fact Dewey has a whole volume with guidelines on choosing between alternatives. So it’s not always a robotic exercise, and I think you have the right to be a little different, as long as you don’t mix together American Indians, Indian Americans, and ... American Indians!

08 Skimming Dewey numbers off Web catalogues

DDC is a classification scheme, and a list of items arranged according to this or other scheme, would be called a catalogue. Very often you may not be sure where a particular book should go (more on that anon), so one easy short-cut for us lazier types, is to follow whatever they have done in our favourite large library. With more and more libraries going on-line (they put their catalogues on-line, not the book contents!), we don’t even have to physically visit the library to check their classification. So we can even do our work without the benefit of the original manuals of the DDC.

Let’s take yesterday’s example of Birds (Aves), which as you can see is a special favourite. I have a book with me called “A Pocket Guide to Birds of Gorumara”, which is a small wildlife sanctuary in the northern part of the state of West Bengal in India. From the last post, we recall 598 is the DDC ‘hundreds’ code for Birds, freely supplied for our use by the OCLC on its web-site. The subdivision for geographical areas is 09, and we know 0954 is for South Asia and India (from 954 History). 598.0954 is as close as I can get, therefore, without additional help.

This is where the on-line catalogues come in use. First, I could try searching for “Birds of West Bengal”… getting it from the British Library, www.bl.uk (wonderful things come in simple packages!). Searching for ‘birds, bengal’ didn’t yield much, but ‘history, bengal’ yielded a book with Dewey number 954.14, which hints at 095414 as a possible code for Bengal. So at a first guess, we could settle for a number 598.095414 for my little book. I can do a sort of counter-check by searching for ‘birds, india’ and scrolling down... I get 1,150 results, and I would expect Bengal to come up fairly early down the list since the Dewey number for India would be ...954.. and Bengal comes up in the first subdivision, ...9541... Unfortunately for the best-laid plans of mice and stingy librarians, the general catalogue doesn’t yield too many Dewey numbers: a Birds of Goa has 598.2954799, Birds of Sikkim gives 598.295497, which hints at the use of 598.29... for birds of a region, as well as tells us the Dewey numbers of place for Goa 0954799 and Sikkim 095497. I didn’t find any numbers for Bengal, or Calcutta (only a few of the catalogue entries have DDC numbers), but I did find a Birds of Delhi 598.095456, and Birds of the Western Ghats 598.09547, which gives us Dewey codes of place for the two regions, as well as confirming the alternative of using 598.09... for regional birds. So I guess I’d settle for 598.095414 for my book on the Birds of Bengal.

Another source is the Library of Congress www.loc.gov , which seems a bit faster and to have a higher proportion of records with Dewey numbers (just my impression). This one also yields a book on Islam in Bengal 954.14, confirming our Place number, and Birds of North India 598.0954, Birds of Southwest India 598.09548, Birds of Sikkim 598.295497. Thus numbers of Place are consistent, and again both conventions are used: 598.29... and 598.09... You may take your pick... I probably would settle for staid old 598.09..., as it falls into a predictable pattern when you don’t have the manuals at hand.

The on-line catalogues also yield up other interesting numbers, allowing us to build a picture of the structure without help from OCLC. Just searching for “birds” yields 28284 records in loc.gov, and it’s only by the 10^th page (each with 50 records) that we get off just “Birds” as the title (all DDC 598), to something titled “Bird life” with DDC 598.2. This is followed by “Sea birds” 598.2924, which tells us that 598.29 is a special category that has not only geographical names from 598.294 onwards, but also special connotations under 598.292, and possibly 598.293. “Bird watching and bird behaviour” is given 598.2 (which doesn’t look convincing), and “Birds’ nests”, 598.2564. And thus it goes...

Why this elaborate exercise? It gives us ready-made numbers, and it yields us new numbers when we don’t have access to The Book. One really tedious thing is that the records don’t display the DDC number up front... you have to click on each book and call up (display) the individual record. And even then most of them don’t even have the Dewey number entered!

PS: I just discovered Dewey offers a book-by-book service in their site www.classify.oclc.org... check it out! You have to click down to a single book record to see the suggested DDC 'class number' (it also gives the LC number for that book).

07 Adding a geographical label to the subject

Here’s an interesting facet of the DDC (and other such schemes of classification). Like I said in the last post, you want a row of books on the birds arranged in a sequence of the major geographical zones or areas, and likewise for books on mammals, or trees, or anything else of universal interest and prevalence.

DDC provides this in some subjects by giving a separate number for each geographical ‘jurisdiction’ (continent, country, region, etc.). If you look at the 900s series for Geography and for History, you will find a similar pattern repeating: starting with 910 (Geography and travel), we have the sequence 913 Ancient world, 914 Europe, 915 Asia, 916 Africa, 917 North America. 918 South America, 919 Other areas. This suggests the coding of numbers 4 to 9 to the continents listed. This pattern in repeated in more detail in the series for History: starting with 930, History of the ancient world, we get numbers corresponding to ancient China 931, ancient Egypt 932, and so on. This suggests that in Geography 913, we could repeat the same sequence but with a decimal point: 913.0 Geography of ancient world (though we never write the zero after a round number, so it’s just 913); 913.1 of ancient China; and so forth.

Extending this pattern, we have 940 History of Europe, followed by 941 of British Isles, 942 of England & Wales, 943 of Central Europe; Germany, and so on. This suggests for Geography & travel, under 914 (914.0) Europe, 914.1 British Isles, 914.2 England & Wales, 914.3 of Central Europe; Germany, and so on. As I said, OCLC don’t provide numbers beyond the decimal point in public media, so I shouldn’t be posting them out here without infringing their copyrights; but since the 3-digit (‘hundreds’) numbers are available free, you can build decimal numbers by analogy without their manual and without stepping on their property rights. It’s interesting to note that even worlds yet to be discovered are provided for, in 999 Extraterrestrial worlds!

But not all subjects are provided with separate numbers for geographical jurisdictions like this. Suppose you want, for instance, to arrange your bird guides: Birds (Aves) is 598 in the DDC Thousand Sections list. Now we want Birds of Europe, Birds of Asia, Birds of Africa, Birds of North America, of South America, and of Other areas. This isn’t done by adding the digits immediately after the decimal, *598.4, *598.5 etc. (the star or asterisk shall be taken to denote a wrong formulation, as in Historical Linguistics). These numbers actually stand for specific, other sub-divisions of the subject Birds, which we can get only from the official DDC book. But never fear, there is one expedient which DDC gives in any number: the provision to attach 09 followed by the geographical place marker. This gives numbers like 598.094 Birds of Europe, 598.095 of Asia, and so on. Just using the 900s numbers, we can go a little further within each continent: 598.0951 Birds of China, 598.0952 of Japan, 598.0953 of Arabia, 598.0954 of South Asia, 598.0955 of Iran, 598.0956 of Middle East, 598.0957 of Siberia (Asiatic Russia), 598.0958 of Central Asia, 598.0959 of Southeast Asia.

Of course if you had the DDC books with you, you could drill right down to country, province and even further in some cases. But we don’t want to abuse OCLC’s generosity, so you get at least a broad sequence of regions which can be repeated for almost any subject by just attaching the ‘connector’ 09 after the number, and then adding the region/country code which is a consistent series.

In doing thus, you will get a serviceable arrangement of your books by geographical region, without having to cheat on the copyright business. It may not be strictly kosher, as DDC sometimes gives a decimal number ending in 9 to which the area codes can be attached without need for an intervening zero: for Birds 598, if I remember rightly, there’s a given number 598.29 for Birds by geographical region, so that instead of *598.094 Birds of Europe and so on, it should strictly be 598.294 Birds of Europe etc. But this is a relatively minor infraction, and if you don’t have an Inspector of Libraries looking over your shoulder, you should be able to get away with it and still have a serviceable arrangement as per *DDC!

06 Why at all arrange our books subject-wise?

An interesting question is: why at all bother with a physical sorting of our books by subject heads? After all, any database program would have a search facility that could easily locate the books with selected keywords. Then all we would have to do is to add our new books at the end of the pile, or shelf, with a running serial number (the ‘acquisition’ number in library-speak), and as long as the books were kept in their serial order, we could locate the selected book physically.

Well, this is more or less the system people use to maintain reprints and papers in academic collections. The effort of sorting and grouping them subject-wise becomes unproductive, because they are usually read only once. They are also so thin that they can easily get lost sight of in between all the other papers. So what is done is to give them a running serial number, type in the title and author in a database program, enter a bunch of keywords (from the Dewey listing, if needed), and forget the whole question of shelf mark and classification. Then, when you want to retrieve papers on a particular subject, just enter the keywords in your database’s search facility, and you will get the serial numbers of the relevant papers (holdings, assets). You can keep them in boxes, as anyway they won’t stand up in shelves...

There are no doubt large collections which do use this run-of-the-mill approach for scholarly books, text books and so on which may be accessed only occasionally. But for the books in your personal library, half (or much more!) of the joy of possessing them lies in your physical interaction with them. You want to touch them, admire their serried rows from a distance, riffle their pages, read a chapter or two, and sometimes even dip your nose in them. If you are a bird watcher, you want a row of books on the birds of each major geographical zone, or of major orders or families. If you are a philosophy enthusiast, you want a row of books covering each school of thought; and if you are into history, obviously you want a series covering each continent and period. If you love food, you want to browse different cuisines all at once.

You are a collector, and collectors like to view things in sets. You may lose your sleep if one volume is missing in a series, and that’s why these stray volumes of a set command high prices. For such collections, then, there’s nothing to match the elegance and sheer feeling of wholeness that a structured classification system provides.

05 The DDC thousand Sections (subject heads)

The DDC thousand Sections are on their own page (see the tabs on the top of the screen).

The following links give the Dewey summaries:

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/summaries/deweysummaries.pdf

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/summaries/default.htm#thou

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/summaries/default.htm#hun

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/summaries/default.htm#ten

The summaries are also available on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes

Life can never be as simple as it looks, and as far as the DDC is concerned, there are revisions every couple of years which needs a fresh ‘release’ or version. I myself still use the DDC 20 version, which mainly had a major revision of the Music sections. There have been quite a few major changes since then, especially in Computer subjects (000s) and in the Natural Sciences (500s). The latest is the 23^rd print version, DDC23 released in 2011; the following list (taken from the DDC website) refers to the DDC 22 version released in mid-2003; DDC 21 was released in 1996 (more of versions in a later post). All copyright rights in the Dewey Decimal Classification system are owned by OCLC. Dewey, Dewey Decimal Classification, DDC, OCLC and WebDewey are registered trademarks of OCLC, oclc@oclc.org.

The following links will take you to downloadable pdf documents from the OCLC site, providing an introduction to the DDC 22, a glossary, and a guide to the major changes from DDC 21:

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/versions/ddc22print/intro.pdf

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/versions/ddc22print/glossary.pdf

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/versions/ddc22print/new_features.pdf

The following links will take you to similar pdf’s for DDC 23:

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/versions/print/intro.pdf

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/versions/print/relocations_discontinuations.xls

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/versions/print/glossary.pdf

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/versions/print/new_features.pdf

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/versions/print/errata.pdf

Here’s a link to the OCLC blog: http://ddc.typepad.com/025431/

In my experience, classification can become a puzzling affair if taken to the extreme; one has to draw the line somewhere comfortable, and choose whatever number gives a close enough fit until further research is feasible (or look it up in their blog!). There are ways to cheat a little, like looking up your book (if it’s a published one, or else a close alternative with a similar title) on any of the public library websites; my favourite is the British Library (http://www.bl.uk/)!

Apparently, the numbers up to the Sections (3 digits, before the decimal point) are freely available on public media, but the detailed classification scheme to the right of the decimal point, would require you to purchase a copy of the manual (or its web version, of course).

04 The DDC hundred Divisions

Before we go on to list the thousand Dewey subject numbers and subject headings, let’s take a look at the broader structure. The DDC groups all subjects in TEN broad CLASSes, each starting with a round ‘hundreds’ number:

000      Generalities (Computer Science, Information, and General Works)

100      Philosophy and Psychology

200      Religion

300      Social Sciences

400      Language (and Linguistics)
500      Natural Sciences and Mathematics

600      Technology (Applied Sciences)

700      Arts (and Recreation)

800      Literature800 Literature

900      Geography and History (and Biography)

So these are the ‘Hundreds’. All the 900s – that means the numbers 900 to 999 - cover the field of Geography and History, and so on. Each of the Hundreds Classes is subdivided into ten DIVISIONS each (900 to 909, 910 to 919, and so on), each Division into ten SECTIONS. Ten Classes, into ten Divisions, into ten Sections each: totalling up to 10 X 10 X 10 = a 1000 Section numbers, a thousand subject heads.

I've put the hundred Divisions on their own Page...see the tabs at the top of the screen.

So where does the ‘Decimal’ in the DDC come in? That’s because the subdividing doesn’t stop here; the process goes right on, except that a decimal point is put after the 3-digit number. Thus 910 can be subdivided into ten sub-classes (910.0 to 910.9), each of these could be further divided into ten sub-sub-classes (910.90 to 910.99), and so on… to as many levels as we wanted. Strictly, the numbers ending in zero after the decimal point (like 910.0) are not given separate mention, so the total number of subdivisions may be 9, not 10 for each level. Each number is associated with an individual subclass of the main subject. This is usually set down in detail for each number, as each subject will be broken down in a domain-specific manner, but there are some broad conventions, such as .01 refers to the ‘philosophy’ or ‘theory’ of the main subject. There is in fact a Table of Standard Subdivisions, which we will describe later.

03 The Dewey Decimal scheme: playing by numbers

Now we can address the core problem, which is: how to arrange our non-fiction (the ‘subject-matter’) books in a meaningful manner. The basic premise is, of course, that we can identify one main subject of each book or report in our hands. Dewey has done half our job by listing out a thousand main subject names, starting not from 1, but 000, to 999, in a remarkably prescient manner which conforms neatly to the usual practice in our own computer age (all the numbers are 3-digit ones, hence can perfectly fitted into a fixed field in a database structure).

For the first round of classification, perhaps this is all that we will need to arrange our books subject-wise. Within each subject, naturally we will be arranging our books by the alphabetical ordering of author last-names, thus (Richard) Dawkins would come after (Charles) Darwin. If you had two books by Dawkins, you would arrange them by their date of (first) publication. These three fields: DDC three-digit code number, Author name, and Year, would suffice to order your books in a perfectly predictable sequence.

The whole structure depends on the expectation that any new subject could be ‘adjusted’ under these thousand heads. If you did have a subject that didn’t fit into a single one of them, of course you’d have a problem…then there would have to be a sufficient number of ‘empty’ numbers to cater to these eventualities. In practice, most subjects could be fitted as a sub-category under the thousand main categories provided by Dewey.

One great feature of this system is that if you walked into any library or looked up any catalogue that also followed the same classification scheme (the DDC in this case), you would expect to find your favourite books and authors in the same sequence. If you were interested in say Physics, you would zero in on the 500s; if in History and Geography, on the 900s. These are the Dewey 'hundreds', which bring together related subjects in groups. A little down the line, you will be glibly talking in numbers rather than in names. Unlike bookshops, where each manager devices an individual scheme of arranging the subjects, in academic and public libraries, all of them follow the same. This is spoilt to some extent by the fact that there are two or three main systems; fortunately, the second most common, the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) closely follows the DDC, and the hundreds numbers are all quite similar.

02 Let’s first get some simple schemes out of the way…

Let’s first get over some elementary, basic approaches to classifying and cataloguing your books. I have a certain brilliant friend, a genuine manager bureaucrat, who once was in charge of a premiere research institution, who wanted to know why they didn’t just ‘colour-code’ the books in the library and be done with it. He may have been kinaesthetic, or panaesthetic, or any of a number of novel, unusual ways of dealing with sensory stimuli. But for large collections, we will usually have to go for fairly structured approaches that depend on the most convenient pattern of arrangement for us in our workaday lives.

For a small personal collection, often nothing more elaborate may be called for than a simple Fiction/Non-fiction divide.  The Fiction is the easier portion, as most people don’t really want to divide it up into sub-categories, unless it’s by nation and language (English, English-American, French, Russian, German and so forth). Since the Indo-Soviet culture centres used to distribute amazingly economical volumes (cheap is not a nice word to use for them), I happen to have a middling collection of old Russians like Pushkin and Chekhov. If you have a large collection of, say, English literature, maybe you would like to group them by what is known as ‘genre’, like prose, drama, poetry, criticism, essays, and so on. Or, you could group them by periods… Ancient, Classical, Romantic, Nationalistic, modern, post-modern, and so on (I don’t know much about this, perhaps you would have specific classes in each nationality’s literature, depending on the watershed events in their history and evolution). Within such a category or sub-category, you would group them by author’s name, like Shakespeare, Wordsworth and so on (usually in the order of the surnames or family names, not by the first names, although we will come back to this in a later post). You would have one set for classical works (Literature or belles-lettres as it’s termed), and another separate series for modern fiction (popular stuff, pulp, romances, and so on). The dividing line is a bit vague…where would you put Agatha Christie, for instance. Maybe you could just do post-World War II and pre-WWII and be done with it.

This is more or less the scheme in the Dewey system, too. The same could be extended to all Non-fiction as a whole, if you have very few in this category. Personally, I feel that sooner or later this will become too limiting, so I would much prefer to start dividing them up by at least some major subject categories right from the beginning…at the minimum, say Humanities and Sciences. Within each, of course, you would arrange the books in alphabetical order of the author names.

There are some other plausible criteria for dividing your collection. For instance, big hard-bound picture books and encyclopaedias could go into a shelf of their own, within which they would of course be arranged in the order of the author names. In libraries, this may be called the ‘Folio’ section referring to the big size, which anyway calls for special shelving, or maybe the ‘Reference’ section to denote their high value, so this is not as daft as it may sound.

Another scheme would be to separate His, Hers, and the Kids’ books. That will avoid recriminations. In fact, I would strongly urge each person to only fiddle around with their own collections, and not touch their spouses’ or their kids’ books and records…you have been warned.

01 What this is about

How do we manage our acquisitions of books, papers, magazines, tapes, CDs and other things we just can't bring ourselves to give away? These are the things that in a way define our life experience, our travel through the world. They've kept us company through happy days and sad, through exciting times and dull periods. But left to themselves, they become almost useless as they are all jumbled up, they get tucked away in dusty corners and tattered cardboard boxes in the basement, and they introduce health-threatening clutter and disorder.

This question may not loom very large at the beginning of our acqisitorial lives, but a few years down the line, a few shifts of residence, and the issue of keeping, storing, and retrieving them at our will and convenience, becomes important.

My own response was to take the bull by the horns, grasp the nettle, and organize my books and music using recognized classification schemes like the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), although there are other... especially the one I started with, the Universal Decimal scheme (UDC), and for Forestry (my profession), a modification of it called the Oxford (ODC). Let me share my experiences in the hope that it may be of some help to some blighted soul groaning under the weight of all that rubbish.... but organized even imperfectly, can be enjoyed and used by self and others...