20 The physical catalogue on cards

We would all like to have a detailed list of the books and tapes we own. The basic version, of course, is to have a long notebook (a ledger) for each type of possession, and go on entering our acquisitions as they come in, with basic description, title, date of purchase, and price paid. A separate ledger could be maintained for books and other texts, perhaps with separate sections for periodicals and for reprints or ‘grey’ matter (newsletters, mimeographs, occasional documents); and separate ledgers for recorded media (CDs, tapes, etc.), all types of equipment, and what have you. A running serial number may be all that is required to identify each item, and if you put this number on a sticker on or in the item itself, you have a robust and simple system to keep track of their status. When you give an item away, you can record the information and draw a diagonal line through its entry as token of disposal. In fact I use precisely this system to keep track of my financial investments (and significant equipment purchases), as it has the advantage over a computer based system of being always ready to go, robust and physically available at hand, and amenable to all sorts of annotation, on the run, whenever a thought strikes. Of course, it doesn’t produce nicely formatted reports or column totals, and doesn’t send out warning beeps when it’s time for renewal or servicing, which a computer system could do, but I suspect that it will be too late by the time I get round to putting all this on disk. Anyway, the old data will always reside between the covers.

When it comes to books, however, if you plan to have a few thousand, it makes sense to build up a card catalogue from the beginning. My card catalogue started when I was collecting references for my doctoral thesis; my book acquisitions took up steam only sometime after that, so it was a natural extension to enter the books as well on those 3 by 5 inch cards. Now it has become a ritual whenever I get home with any books or reports, whether from the bookshops or from meetings and conferences. They all get entered in the 3 by 5’s, and put into the card tray. Usually I enter the classification number as well, but if I am too bothered with other stuff to do it rightaway, I keep the unclassified cards in a separate holding tray, to be filled in later. I also enter the classification and date of purchase on the first leaf of the book itself (in pencil!), so that I can put it in its due place on the shelf after I have finished reading it (which is falling behind these days!.

What do I put on the card? There are very elaborate conventions on this, the best known being the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2), of which I have a copy of the Concise version, revised 1988, prepared by Michael Gorman, and published jointly by the American Library Association (Chicago), the Canadian Library Association (Ottawa), and The Library Association (London). But I rarely look into it. I have standardized on the following format: leave the top line blank, on the next line enter the author’s name following the usual last name – first name conventions used in citing references, and year of publication; below that, the title of the work and any subtitles or smart one-liners; then other editorial information like series or set name and general editor (if important enough), illustrators, foreword writer (if an eminent person), then edition number, publisher and place, and finally the international book number (and Library of Congress number if available). At the top left, I write the Dewey class number, followed by shelf numbers (usually three letters from the author name, followed by year) to identify it uniquely; on top right, any special Location (Music Records, or Series, or Loft, for example). At bottom left, I pencil in date and price (both original and buying price if needed), and any supplemental information like key words, alternate classification numbers, etc. All this by hand: it takes a couple of minutes, and my record is ready! The cards are physically kept in a metal card cabinet with four sliding trays. You don't even have to go and buy the printed cards: you could do as well with any old paper cut to size (I notice my institute library does this for their internal purposes, although their actual catalogue is on computer, of course). Not pretty, but works well enough!

The official AARC rules are very precise about what each card should contain, and they also have official registers for the correct way of expressing names and so on. For the record, the following areas are prescribed:

Area 1: Title and statement of responsibility

Area 2: Edition

Area 3: Material (or type of publication) specific details (serials, computer files, maps, music etc.)

Area 4: Publication, distribution, etc.

Area 5: Physical description

Area 6: Series

Area 7: Notes

Area 8: Standard number and terms of availability

Area 9: Supplementary items

Area 10: Items made up of more than one type of material

Area 11: Facsimiles, photocopies, other reproductions

One point on which I disagree with the AARC2 is the rule that editors and compilers should not be made the “main entry”. I prefer to stick to only one type of main entry, which is the author or editor, and if this is not available, then sometimes the corporate body itself or even the publisher (like Government, or National Geographic, or Newsweek, or Oxford). AARC2 says that in the absence of a clear author or creator, one should use the title as first entry (leaving out articles at the start, e.g. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, The). Sometimes I have used the dreaded Anonymous, too, but that is not a happy solution as it may tend to bunch up a lot of stuff at the head; much better to put the organisation name instead.

Actually, I don’t think they expect all the fields to be filled; the main bits, of course, are author, title and identification by edition or book number. If you have the time, by all means fill in some of the other stuff. The class numbers are my favourite, because I arrange both my cards and my shelves according to them; naturally, I favour Dewey Decimal numbers (I’m on DC22 now). This gets the books in order of field of knowledge and subject matter (in the Dewey order with all its idiosyncrasies!), which suits a knowledge-based user better than arranging by author name alone (or by title!). Very occasionally, if a book seems equally at home in two classes, I may put in a card for each DDC number, giving the shelf position on the top line. Of course, if I have two copies (which happens occasionally!), I put one copy in each location.

These other types of catalogue, of course, are also useful sometimes (e.g., if you are making up a short list in a particular discipline). In public libraries, they used to make up two card catalogues, one arranged by Subject (following the DDC or any other system), and the other by Author, called respectively the Subject Index (which could be an Alphabetical or a Classified Index) and the Author Index. Nowadays, of course, catalogues are maintained on computers, and the database software will allow you to list them by almost any of the fields: maybe by year, or publisher, or combinations.

I don’t actually use the card catalogue much, except to keep it up to date. At the back of my mind is the expectation that I will enter it into a computer some day (but I wonder whether that will actually be useful). I do not think it will help my heirs to sort out what is to be thrown or given away, nor do I expect my Maker to call me to account on this matter! I do riffle through it once in a while to see whether I have a certain book already, if I cannot see it anywhere around. Of course, since it is only a classified index, it won’t help me do alternate searches on author or ISBN or title; that will be possible only if it is put on a computer. I did make an experiment with a couple of software packages to do this, and I will talk about this next post.

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).

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...