[Web4lib] Innovation: NYT article on Dewey-less Arizonapubliclibrary

[Richard Wiggins]

Do we really know whether any system, whether LC at a large research
library, or Dewey at a small public, or ad-hoc at a used bookstore, "works"?

I knew a professor who made it through an entire career thinking that the
way to survey the literature was to find one book in the catalog that was on
topic, then walk the shelves nearby.

Never mind that LC and all classification schemes are arbitrary and that the
gem you need may have a call number several shelves away.  Never mind that
the gem may be checked out or lost.  Never mind that perhaps your library
never acquired the gems in the first place.

As far as this chap was concerned, LC "worked" for him because it gave him a
starting point in the shelves, and he left the library with books in his
arms.

This fellow made it through an academic career.  Now obviously he found
other references to important works in his field, in journal articles,
informal chat, etc.  But I wouldn't have trusted him to survey other
disciplines thoroughly.

/rich


On 7/16/07, K.G. Schneider <kgs at bluehighways.com> wrote:
>
>
> 1. How heavily librarians seem invested in proving that this post-Dewey
> classification model won't work in most situations; like... who cares? If
> it
> or some other model worked better than what we have, wouldn't we be happy
> for everyone concerned?
>
> Furthermore, I keep hearing arguments of where it WON'T work. How about
> where it might work well? Dewey doesn't work for Harvard, either... unless
> I'm greatly mistaken. Other numbering schemes came about because we saw
> problems with Dewey.
>
> How about working backwards from the premise that Dewey doesn't serve
> users
> as well as we'd like, which is something we know already?
>
>