also, while i'm asking library questions. what's your thoughts on classification systems? is there a system you wish was more commonplace? or do you think attempting to organize all books into neat heirarchical groups is a mistake? i was looking at how the dewey decimal system is actually arranged again lately, and i think it makes some exceedingly dubious decisions. and yet it, alongside the LCC, seem to be everywhere.
me and @iliana once tried to make our own classification system for our personal collection of books, but as it turns out, this is a fast way to learn why library science is an entire difficult technical domain you can get a degree in.
Different classification schemes are suited to different purposes. I'm only familiar with Dewey Decimal Classification System (DDC) and the Library of Congress Classification System (LCC). I've never used UDC or CC or any of the many many national classification systems. These classification systems are living systems and consortiums of librarians regularly revise them.
When I've worked in an academic library, I found LCC to be a pretty good system. I appreciated that with just 2 letters you could get quite precise quite quickly within the publicly available aspects of the schema. Didn't have to pay extra to get into the weeds. I found it to be really useful in a super super large library because it just covered so much precise scientific fields and industries and topics. Although there was also some really dumb stuff hard coded into the system like the whole H outline makes my skin scrawl to browse. I remember discovering that hotel management falls hospitality under home economics which falls under "Women, Marriage, and Family."
DDC is what I've use when I've worked in public libraries and I find it really good for these smaller more accessible libraries. With LCC gaps in the collection feel noticeable when it lurches ahead. DDC kinda elegantly flows if you don't have a bunch of books on a particular subtopic. Where LCC goes from like HQ21 to HR40 very suddenly, DDC goes from 350.1130 to 350.2 A lot of people knock DDC for the 200s dedicating so much high level classification to Christianity and very little space to other religions, however DDC only needs to meet the needs of American Libraries and in America that accurately represents the proportion of books published about these topics. 80% of the 200s goes to Christianity because that's 80% of the books and it's easier to organize them when they have higher level differentiation.
One annoying thing about DDC which doesn't really happen as much LCC is when you have a ton of items on the same subject they have a tendency to just clump together with the same call number and you'll just be combing through cutter numbers endlessly. LCC gets more fine grained usually. Another annoying thing about DDC is that OCLC makes you pay to access the full schematic outline. If you want to generate originally DDC call numbers it is quite expensive. You can cheat somewhat with the librarything DDC browser but only so well. Unlike LCC, you just can't see the outlines of DDC past the period. 332 is public but not the .4839 part afterwards.
LCC has a tendency to group things together in unusual ways where you ask yourself, like, does it really make sense for "bisexuality" to be a subcategory of "women and marriage?" But at the very least there tends to be like, just the one place where everything on that topic will go and they'll all be near each other. The gradient of topics in LCC feels like it flows in a logical order. DDC has a few topics that consistently get split across two different hundreds place ranges. For instance, the general topic of psychology is in the 100s, but mental health falls under 616. So "philosophical psychology" is in one place and "medical psychology" is 500 call numbers away. The other place this happens is with history. "Social studies" history is in the 300s but "HISTORY history" is in the 900s. Patrons looking for Black History in the 900s will get confused when most of those books are actually 600 call numbers away! Computers get this too, "computer science" is in 000s but "technology" is in the 600s... The result is that a lot of libraries have to clump things out of numerical order and create a "how to use computers section." Or in big public libraries like in Philly, they'll have departments which manage different topics of very disparate numerical ranges. So Philly's central public library has like, "The Education, Religion, and Philosophy Department" which manages 100, 200, and 400. "Social Science and History" which manages 300 and 900. "Art and Literature" which manages 700 and 800; and "Science & Wellness" which manages 000, 500, and 600. These are the most logical ways to group these ranges but it's quite silly that they don't go in order! And also because "cooking" is a "technology" all the cookbooks are in the Science department. But Psychology, despite being a science, goes Education Religion and Philosophy, unless it's mental health! Then it's science!!!
Which I think really highlights how DDC works best in smaller libraries which cover fewer subjects where you don't have to split hairs so much. And LCC works better in larger libraries. I used to work at a school library which was very small and used LCC and it hardly felt like the books were organized by any subject at all when it makes huge lurches from HA20 to HJ49 with nothing in the middle. The gradient gets lost and the H outline is just so broad that you're like, why are books about being gay next to books about keeping the kitchen clean.
DDC is definitely more accessible. School children can memorize: 0 = computers and books 1 = philosophy 2 = religion 3 = social studies 4 = education 5 = science 6 = technology 7 = art 8 = literature 9 = history. You can just put up a charge of the public outline on the aisle wall and people are able to navigate on their own. You absolutely cannot do this with LCC. The information desk at the academic library I worked at had custom LCC outline charts that I created with the other interns which just pulled out the common subjects we get asked about and they were pages upon pages long and you really did need to have a library science background to quickly navigate them. LCC is just so very detailed like that. You just don't need that much detail unless your library is huge.
I do kinda wanna learn UDC at some point but I just really don't have any cause to do so. I've never left the country so I've never been in a library that uses UDC.
