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!