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…

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!

08 Skimming Dewey numbers off Web catalogues

DDC is a classification scheme, and a list of items arranged according to this or other scheme, would be called a catalogue. Very often you may not be sure where a particular book should go (more on that anon), so one easy short-cut for us lazier types, is to follow whatever they have done in our favourite large library. With more and more libraries going on-line (they put their catalogues on-line, not the book contents!), we don’t even have to physically visit the library to check their classification. So we can even do our work without the benefit of the original manuals of the DDC.

Let’s take yesterday’s example of Birds (Aves), which as you can see is a special favourite. I have a book with me called “A Pocket Guide to Birds of Gorumara”, which is a small wildlife sanctuary in the northern part of the state of West Bengal in India. From the last post, we recall 598 is the DDC ‘hundreds’ code for Birds, freely supplied for our use by the OCLC on its web-site. The subdivision for geographical areas is 09, and we know 0954 is for South Asia and India (from 954 History). 598.0954 is as close as I can get, therefore, without additional help.

This is where the on-line catalogues come in use. First, I could try searching for “Birds of West Bengal”… getting it from the British Library, www.bl.uk (wonderful things come in simple packages!). Searching for ‘birds, bengal’ didn’t yield much, but ‘history, bengal’ yielded a book with Dewey number 954.14, which hints at 095414 as a possible code for Bengal. So at a first guess, we could settle for a number 598.095414 for my little book. I can do a sort of counter-check by searching for ‘birds, india’ and scrolling down... I get 1,150 results, and I would expect Bengal to come up fairly early down the list since the Dewey number for India would be ...954.. and Bengal comes up in the first subdivision, ...9541... Unfortunately for the best-laid plans of mice and stingy librarians, the general catalogue doesn’t yield too many Dewey numbers: a Birds of Goa has 598.2954799, Birds of Sikkim gives 598.295497, which hints at the use of 598.29... for birds of a region, as well as tells us the Dewey numbers of place for Goa 0954799 and Sikkim 095497. I didn’t find any numbers for Bengal, or Calcutta (only a few of the catalogue entries have DDC numbers), but I did find a Birds of Delhi 598.095456, and Birds of the Western Ghats 598.09547, which gives us Dewey codes of place for the two regions, as well as confirming the alternative of using 598.09... for regional birds. So I guess I’d settle for 598.095414 for my book on the Birds of Bengal.

Another source is the Library of Congress www.loc.gov , which seems a bit faster and to have a higher proportion of records with Dewey numbers (just my impression). This one also yields a book on Islam in Bengal 954.14, confirming our Place number, and Birds of North India 598.0954, Birds of Southwest India 598.09548, Birds of Sikkim 598.295497. Thus numbers of Place are consistent, and again both conventions are used: 598.29... and 598.09... You may take your pick... I probably would settle for staid old 598.09..., as it falls into a predictable pattern when you don’t have the manuals at hand.

The on-line catalogues also yield up other interesting numbers, allowing us to build a picture of the structure without help from OCLC. Just searching for “birds” yields 28284 records in loc.gov, and it’s only by the 10^th page (each with 50 records) that we get off just “Birds” as the title (all DDC 598), to something titled “Bird life” with DDC 598.2. This is followed by “Sea birds” 598.2924, which tells us that 598.29 is a special category that has not only geographical names from 598.294 onwards, but also special connotations under 598.292, and possibly 598.293. “Bird watching and bird behaviour” is given 598.2 (which doesn’t look convincing), and “Birds’ nests”, 598.2564. And thus it goes...

Why this elaborate exercise? It gives us ready-made numbers, and it yields us new numbers when we don’t have access to The Book. One really tedious thing is that the records don’t display the DDC number up front... you have to click on each book and call up (display) the individual record. And even then most of them don’t even have the Dewey number entered!

PS: I just discovered Dewey offers a book-by-book service in their site www.classify.oclc.org... check it out! You have to click down to a single book record to see the suggested DDC 'class number' (it also gives the LC number for that book).

06 Why at all arrange our books subject-wise?

An interesting question is: why at all bother with a physical sorting of our books by subject heads? After all, any database program would have a search facility that could easily locate the books with selected keywords. Then all we would have to do is to add our new books at the end of the pile, or shelf, with a running serial number (the ‘acquisition’ number in library-speak), and as long as the books were kept in their serial order, we could locate the selected book physically.

Well, this is more or less the system people use to maintain reprints and papers in academic collections. The effort of sorting and grouping them subject-wise becomes unproductive, because they are usually read only once. They are also so thin that they can easily get lost sight of in between all the other papers. So what is done is to give them a running serial number, type in the title and author in a database program, enter a bunch of keywords (from the Dewey listing, if needed), and forget the whole question of shelf mark and classification. Then, when you want to retrieve papers on a particular subject, just enter the keywords in your database’s search facility, and you will get the serial numbers of the relevant papers (holdings, assets). You can keep them in boxes, as anyway they won’t stand up in shelves...

There are no doubt large collections which do use this run-of-the-mill approach for scholarly books, text books and so on which may be accessed only occasionally. But for the books in your personal library, half (or much more!) of the joy of possessing them lies in your physical interaction with them. You want to touch them, admire their serried rows from a distance, riffle their pages, read a chapter or two, and sometimes even dip your nose in them. If you are a bird watcher, you want a row of books on the birds of each major geographical zone, or of major orders or families. If you are a philosophy enthusiast, you want a row of books covering each school of thought; and if you are into history, obviously you want a series covering each continent and period. If you love food, you want to browse different cuisines all at once.

You are a collector, and collectors like to view things in sets. You may lose your sleep if one volume is missing in a series, and that’s why these stray volumes of a set command high prices. For such collections, then, there’s nothing to match the elegance and sheer feeling of wholeness that a structured classification system provides.