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

[Jennifer Heise]

> 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?


I think the trouble is that we, as librarian-patrons, are exactly the sort
of people for whom the BISAC system already fails to work in really annoying
ways. BISAC, in fact, is an example of a system that capitalizes on
satisficing; you may not be able to find anything in the bloody bookstore
that you came in looking for, and you may not be able to find someone to
look it up for you, but since you're a reader, you'll probably find
something that looks interesting and buy that instead. In fact, the more
obstacles a retail organization can get away with putting between you and
what you came in for, the better it is for business.

If you're just looking for 'books on gardens' this works out. For a browsing
collection of which people have very very low standards of specialization,
it would work.

As people who try to use libraries and bookstores to find information, I
think we anticipate the frustration and leave aside the fun of browsing such
wide categories.