The Dewey Decimal system is better than I thought.

[gement]

Yesterday I had one of those hallucinatory insights brought on by 6 hours of sorting shelves.

Dewey doesn't make clumps of unsorted books. IMPRECISE LIBRARIANS do that. Every book has a Dewey number out to five places. Having now seen the "Children's Crafts", "Mythology", and "Cookbooks" digits sorely abused now, I have a better idea of how I would run things in my perfect little world.

1) There is never a reason to truncate to a whole number. Always include at least one decimal place.

2) If a topic has a chance of being even reasonably popular, go ahead and put two places. It won't hurt anything, really. If the cookbooks even had two places, I probably wouldn't be ranting right now.

3) If you know you're heading into territory like "Cookbooks," "Cute Fuzzy Animals," or "Mythology," USE THREE PLACES SO IT'S NOT MEANINGLESSLY SORTED BY AUTHOR.

The rule of thumb for my system is, if you get ten books with an identical number, you should probably label all subsequent books from that area with an extra decimal place and, if you have time, relabel those ten to match.

cow, I take back what I said about Dewey before. I would now be happy to label your collection in either system. For unspeakably large collections, LC is probably still better, but at this point I would need to see a demonstration of that.

Oh, and I have now officially shelf-read (reordered) the library's ENTIRE juvenile section, from Fic A through Biography Z. Go me.

Comments

[cow.livejournal.com]

One of the things I like about LC is that fiction gets a tag as well, so you don't have Fic A through Fic Z in the end.

My collection is not unspeakably large. :( Mostly because I keep giving books away. However, a good example of an unspeakably large collection using LC is the UW libraries -- 6 million volumes, plus periodicals and other good things. Suzzallo is your friend. :)

[drascus.livejournal.com]

Go-go gadget librarian! ^_^

I have this vision of you zipping around the library at bionic speed, franticaly trying to sort books against the tide of people who are making a mess of the shelves.

The reality is probably less exciting. ^_^

*blink*

[gement.livejournal.com]

That's actually remarkably accurate. Just not quite at bionic speeds, though I was pretty close yesterday, clearing 740 through Biographies in one go.

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

I actually agree with cow. (gasp!)

I really like Fiction having actual numbers and such. I can look up some Zelazny book I've never read and go to some little corner of the fifth floor and boom, all sorts of cool stuff.

Maybe I should get some books. I'm in front of the library right now. Muhuhua.

[gement.livejournal.com]

There would be the demonstration I needed. I've obviously never explored an LC fiction section. That's a selling point so foreign to me I'm having trouble even imagining it. Ooh, cold shivers. Sci-fi in its VERY OWN SECTION? I'm sold.

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

Okay, I just went and got The Difference Engine and I'm on the fifth floor and...
I guess those were just wishful memory-rewrite.
PS 3550 to PS 3599 or something like that is all just 'American Fiction'. (But Gibson's Canadian and the Toronto Public Library has him under Canadian Fiction... oh well.)
The full number of The Difference Engine is PS 3557 I2264 D54 1996, and I thought that maybe 'I2264' was a subclassification for 'really good cyberpunky SF', but .. it's just LC-code for 'Gibson'.

.... Which means the entire section is actually just generic fiction, alphabetized.

So it's not much better than Dewey. But letters are a little less confusing than numbers sometimes. Sure makes the new kids confused, though... but having cute first-years say "umm do you know.. how.. to umm.. find .. books?" is kind of fun.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of alphabetization.

Unless you're going to have an electronic inventory, with plenty of terminals to do searches on that include popup maps pointing you to the correct obscure corner, preferably with wireless access so I can search from my pda, then just keep it simple. Particularly if you're video rental store and not a library. I hate having to guess if it is filed under director, or genre, or nationality. Particularly if you're Scarecrow, who has some very odd concepts of genre, one broken search terminal, just reorganized so the popup map doesn't mean anything anymore even if the terminal happens to be working, and has an inventory best counted with scientific notation. Not that the last part is bad, of course, just let me find the movies I want without talking to an employee and feeling like an idiot.

Um, yeah. Back to work for me.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Another excellent point. I'll have to think about that one.