As a government servant (public official),
I tend to collect a lot of reports and documents pertaining to public
administration and government work. These are not exactly good for bedtime
reading (or maybe they are… they do put you to sleep!), but they are nevertheless useful as a source of official
policy statements, progress reports, and statistics in general. They are also
difficult to get outside of the official routines: collect them when you can,
where you can, and don’t throw them away, because chances are you won’t find
them in any collections. In fact, there are occasions when the ministry people
will be approaching you for a copy of some old (but seminal!) report,
especially if they are not in printed form (what is known as ‘grey
literature’).
Now there is always a choice of locations
for these types of documents. One appropriate place for many of these reports
would be with the subject matter concerned, so that they will be a supplement
and a complement to the other books and reports you have. I happen to be in the
field of forestry and natural resources myself, so naturally I tend to collect
a lot of reports of government departments on these subjects. Since I have a
shelf full of stuff on ‘forestry of …’, the natural thing would be to put them
in there with a standard subdivision to denote government reports or
statistical compendiums. The standard subdivisions that I use (with 634.9
Forestry, or 333.75 Forest lands) tend to be
the following: -021 Tabulated and related materials (including statistics,
statistical graphs), which is very good for statistical compilations; and
various sub-divisions of -021. The standard subdivision -025 Directories of
persons and organizations is also useful, especially as you can directly append
place names 1-9 from Table 2. The standard subdivision -05 Serial publications
may be useful, as well as -06 Organizations an management. Indeed government
reports can be safely lodged under -0601 International organizations (you can
give a letter code for well-known bodies like the WB, WWF, and so on); then we
have -0603-0609 for National, state, provincial, local organizations where we
can put government departments and ministries (though these numbers are meant
for actual organizations and government is supposed to go to 350 Public admin.).
The country code is built in directly, so we need not use -09 numbers for these
separately. For educational and research, I prefer -0701-0709, or -07101-07109
Education, or 0711 Higher education/ -0712 Secondary education/ -0715 Adult
education and on-the-job-training (append place numbers directly to all these),
or -07201-07209 Research (here again, numbers of place are already built in).
Thus, forestry research in the FRI, India
Incidentally, the prescribed order of appending
these subdivisions is given in Volume I at the start of Table 1 Standard
Subdivisions. For the numbers I have been referring to above, the order of preference is as follows (only selected
numbers cited here!):
-07 Education, research, related topics
-0601-0609 Organizations
-093-099 Treatment by specific continents,
countries, etc.
-021 Tabulated and related materials
-05 Serial publications
This is actually the order of preference, meaning that we should
choose between them in this order,
rather than an order of precedence
which would be the term to use for the order in which these numbers could be
appended one after the other. Dewey states that these standard subdivisions
should not be added one to the other
“unless specially instructed”, but the temptation is too strong to resist
sometimes! The problem arises because the second subdivision may be
misinterpreted as a part of the first subdivision appended. Thus, if I want to
specify research institutions separately from research itself, I might try to
use both -07 and -06 subdivisions:
report of (or on) the Forest Research Institute in India Africa !
Then the final appendage ’054 may not have any meaning (or could be read as a
time period).
There is another instruction of relevance
here, that is to use -00 to introduce the standard subdivisions, if -0 is
already used in the (main) number for other purposes, or even -000, if -00 is
already used. But whether this can be stretched to a number already having one
appended subdivision is moot (in the above example, 634.9’072’006054, for
instance). The rules do not seem to provide for such concatenations!
So much for the first alternative, which is
to file government and institutional reports together under the concerned
subject. The advantage is obvious, as the person interested in a specific
discipline or topic is served more efficiently in one location. However, there
is another possibility: that is to group together all the official government
reports under Public Administration, 350-359. This is a complex range of
numbers, similar to law 340-349, as it provides for various ways of slicing up
the facets of country, subject, level, etc.
Let me take the example of the Forest Code of Karnataka State, issued
by the Government of Karnataka, as official-sounding a document as can be
imagined. It’s the ‘Blue Book’ for the public forest officials (I suppose you
could then call it a ‘Green Book’!). I have four things to convey: Public
administration, Forest department, Karnataka
state, Code of procedure. Or I might
prefer the state (jurisdiction) before the department. I could even prefer in
some cases the type of document (Code) to come before the other two. Dewey
gives various options for expressing these facets in the classification number.
Option A is to use 351.3-.9 Public
administration in specific countries, thus 351.5487 Public administration in
Karnataka, to which can be added further subdivision -02-04 Specific topics of
public administration. The last are taken from the digits following 35 in the
range 352-354, which cover the different “specific topics”. Since I want forest
administration, I take from the number 354.55 Forestry, the digits following 35,
and add these to the previous number (through the connector -0-), so that
Karnataka forest administration becomes 351.5487’0455. There is an even longer
concatenation possible, because 354.55 Pub. Adm. Forestry itself can take more
appendages, through connector -2-, as provided under 352-354: from 352.2
Organization of administration, I could take the digits 2, and form
351.5487’0455’22 Karnataka forest administration – organization of
administration; or to be narrower, from 352.28 Internal organization, I could
take the digits 28, giving me 351.5487’0455’228, Karnataka forest administration - internal
organization. Or I could choose 352.283 Distribution and delegation of authority,
giving the number 351.5487’0455’2283; or 352.3 Executive management, giving 351.5487’0455’23.
The Karnataka Forest
As if this were not enough, we could take
the “preferred” Option B, which is to use the main numbers 352-354, and add
facets as we go along. Thus, 354.55 Pub. adm. - forest, to which geographic facet
is added through -09, thus 354.55’095487 Pub. Adm. forest in Karnataka. Now the
notes permit us to add to each geographical subdivision in the identical manner
as provided under option A: 354.55’095487’023 Pub. Adm. of forests in
Karnataka, executive management, 354.55’095487’024 Pub. Adm. of forests in
Karnataka, financial adm. and budgets. And so on! And obviously, these
subdivisions are not to be confused with the standard subdivision -023 or -024,
which only goes to reinforce Dewey’s prohibition of stringing standard
subdivisions together in a string.
Now to the bottom line: which is the
preferable option? Dewey likes option B, which is to distribute a country’s
public reports by topic of administration. All forest departments will be in
one place, all education in another, all legal in a third. If however you would
like a particular country’s reports to be grouped together, option A may be
preferred. I suspect it comes down to the nature of the collection: if it has a
large number of countries with few topics, I might like option A (country-wise
arrangement), since country may become the basis of search; whereas if it has a
large number of topics, with very few countries, I may like the reverse, as
country does not become that much of an issue. Since I have reports mostly
about my country (and maybe a few international reports), I guess I would like
to use the topic-wise arrangement, option B.
