29 Public administration in the Dewey Decimal

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, 634.9’072’054 FRI.

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 (as distinguished from a report on the results of the research itself), 634.9’072’06054 FRI. But this could be read as ’07206, which obviously is research in 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 Accounts Code could go under 351.5487’0455’24, using 352.4 Financial administration and budgets. Indeed even the number from which we borrow can itself have concatenated appendages, which gives the possibility of making the process more or less an endless loop.

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.