![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gementYesterday 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.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-03-19 10:56 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-19 11:18 am (UTC)