11 Down the Dewey pathway…

The way The Family does it…

…and down the Dewey pathway:

My collection of wildlife conservation, management, photography, music, history & geography…

10 Sequence of subjects (Classes) in the Dewey Decimal Classification: mixing it up on campus!

The sequence of subjects in the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) is sometimes a bit unsettling. We know from our college days that you can be either the Artsy type, or you can be a science geek, and the two do not mix well. For some reason, Dewey decided to change this well-worn convention, and put his Science and Technology classes in between the Humanities (Social Sciences) and the Arts and Literature:

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

100      Philosophy & psychology
200      Religion
300      Social sciences
400      Language
500      Natural sciences & mathematics
600      Technology (Applied Sciences)
700      The arts
800      Literature & rhetoric
900      Geography & history (& biography)

This is especially unsettling for the languages and literatures enthusiast, who has to run the gamut of the superior science types to get from the linguistics and grammar of his favourite language (400) to its actual literature (800). What I would like to do, actually, would be to keep the 500s and 600s in a separate group by themselves, and continue seamlessly from the 400s to the 700s... or perhaps the 800s. But this would upset the underlying philosophy and concept of a universal classification scheme, and therefore as a sincere classifier, one would not like to take such liberties…

 In a way, one has to conceptualize the sequence as starting from The arts (700s), through Literature (800) and Geography & history (900s), to Generalities (000), Philosophy (200) and so on to Language (400), and THEN adding Science (500) and technology (600). In order to keep the sworn enemies coming together, one could even follow this in the physical layout of the shelves!

 Such discontinuities are common within the classes as well. For instance, the 100s are somewhat jumbled up, with 150 Psychology coming in the midst of Philosophy subjects (Divisions) in the same class. Economics is at 300, but some of its subjects like foreign trade are put in 380 Commerce etc. We usually understand ‘Natural history’ as nature study, but it is given the Section 508, immediately followed by 510 Mathematics and then Physics, Chemistry, and other physical sciences, biology subjects only coming back at 560 Paleontology or 570 Life sciences. As we know, the lack of regard between the artsy crowd and the science geeks differs in degree only from the tepid relationships between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ sciences…  perhaps all this was just a ploy by old man Dewey to mix up the disciplines on the campuses…