Dewey overdue for a makeover, librarians say!
What a misleading headline! But I have noticed that not only does journalism strive to mislead but also my profession – librarianship – tends to mislead. Indeed, lately it seems that we are about obfuscation rather than aiding users to find what they desire.
It is true that if you do not like numbers then Dewey Decimal Classification is at best unattractive to you. Also, the DDC (as it is often referred to) has suffered so many changes over the past four decades that it is a wonder its basic scheme resembles that of Melvil Dewey.
But to throw out the numbers almost just because they are numbers, and just what do numbers mean, in order to make the library more like a bookstore is really throwing out any sense of what intellectual life librarianship may still have.
The newspaper article implies a dire need to impart a different organization to the nonfiction collection in the Frankfort library. I dare say the amount of resources expended is more than would have been expended had the library kept its collection up-to-date in the first place.
One wonders about the sophistication (or lack thereof) the Frankfort folks have – do they not know that domestic animals are different from wild animals, or that botany in the wild is different from that in the cultivated garden. Then there is that weird statement - Ironically, this places “cooking” and “heart attacks” in the same 600 category, according to Dewey’s system – really? Frankly, I think such reorganization exhibits not only a dumbing down of service to the public, but also an anti-intellectual attitude to professional service.
Librarians are the intermediaries charged with training our patrons how to find materials skillfully. Many a time patrons have returned to my desk to thank me for showing them how to navigate the system so that they can do it on their own.
