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. :)