Dewey have to suffer more ‘bookstore’ assaults?

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.

Time to bring back the library

Recently one of the blogs I watch pointed to this article Creating the 21st Century Library and so I read about the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. The article is fascinating not only for the depiction of what appears to be the return of an old-fashioned library but also for the library’s swashbuckling eschewing of what we often consider to be modern library practice.

The Prelingers have no computers, at least in the running of their library – no upfront catalogue on a computer that greets you when you enter the small building. While Megan Prelinger states that the organizing principle is a map of her brain, I sense from the interview that a fairly logical serendipity rules, and that what on the surface or at first glance might appear as chaos is much more organization along the likes most of us function.

(I wonder if David Weinberger of “Everything Is Miscellaneous” has yet visited the library? What she describes in the article cited above certainly strikes me as a ‘Miscellaneous’ style of operating, albeit without noticeable reworking or tagging by the using public.)

What is surpising about this private library is what seems to be its mission to preserve our culture, especially the North American culture. Finding that attitude is a bit refreshing is this current age of only the new is real.

Some points about current library practice arise from this article:

1. In this computerized library age, rarely does a library worry about the classification and the resulting shelving of its materials – if, for example, two popular tax books do not sit side by side because the OCLC classifiers thought one emphasized economics and the other emphasized the law, most librarians today would say, ‘Not to worry – we have the computer and can find both them, no sweat.’

1a. How many of us really do our library research (for novels, taxing issues, car repair, et al) in the computer? My observation is that we first browse the shelves and only when we are unsuccessful do we consult the catalog (card or computer) – we have a basic sense of where things should be, yet we librarians adopt systems whole-hog that reflect at best an artificial sense of order.

2. This reliance upon technology goes so far as to eliminate finding lists. Oh yes, I know they can be printed out from the computer. But the majority of people I work with do not go to the computer like games-players do – they expect aids to their experience to be near the subjects they are interested in exploring.

3. Is your public library about the preservation of your immediate culture so that when you bring your grandchildren to the library ten, twenty years from now you can show them what your culture was like? Or, is your library into buy lots of the new and discard the old no matter how classic, locally significant, and/or locally specific in meaning?

Prelingers may have hit upon something by establishing their library their way – many of the rest of us think a lot like they do.