[Web4lib] RE: [lita-l] Innovation: NYT articleon Dewey-lessArizona public library

[Jimm Wetherbee]

Louise,

My second question about titles vs. volumes revolved around the
assumption that a typical library would have more titles in a given
category that a typical bookstore.  I was simply wondering whether the
Arizona library resolved this by having more categories that normally
found in bookstores to keep the ratio of titles per topic down to assist
browsing or whether the trade-off between a more manageable number of
titles was off-set an increase number of categories.

My last comment was more of a technical services query.  Imagine that
Dewey's granularity stopped at 10 categories and one of them grew
overloaded or a subcategory not seen by patrons no longer seemed
appropriate.  For instance, in LC symbolic logic is often cataloged with
mathematics and not philosophy.  It there is a reason for it, but let us
say that you wanted to move them out of mathematics to philosophy. 
Well, it isn't that difficult because symbolic or mathematical logic has
a discrete call number range.  However, if that level granularity is
removed entirely so that not even the librarians see it, then it becomes
much more difficult to make such changes.  Over all, I heartily agree
that if patrons' typical search behavior looks more like what one finds
a B&N than an ACRL research library, then emulate B&N by all means.  I
am simply curious as to how these sort of questions were addressed
(after all, the change was made by librarians who must have asked
questions like these before they implemented this project).  I also
agree that the NYT article is not as clear as it might have been.  The
again, the article wasn't written for librarians.

--jimm