Dear Delightful Dewey

Let us take a moment to appreciate the mighty Dewey Decimal System.

Some things are never appreciated to the extent they deserve. You could visit a library a thousand times, browsing the shelves for what you want and never realizing that the reason you can browse at all is the Dewey Decimal System and its greatness. Unlike when you visit the Pyramids or the Parthenon, you don't realize the thought and effort of the design process in the final Dewey experience.

Of course, Dewey isn't the best for every collection. Leaving aside the Library of Congress classification scheme or simple alphabetization by author, some libraries choose to organize more like bookstores, to make themselves appear more user-friendly. I don't subscribe to the idea that placing a number on the side of the book makes it unfriendly (I love numbers. Numbers are our friends!) but I do appreciate the drive to make libraries more welcoming for everyone.

The other day a woman came into the library and asked me the difference between Dewey and a Faceted Classification System. The gist is that Dewey is hierarchical: cows are in the mammals section of the living things section, basically, and that's the only place cows are put. By contrast, a Faceted system allows several ways to get at the same information: jewellery is divided into gold, silver, and platinum, which is a “Materials” facet, but it’s also divided into bracelets, earrings, and necklaces, which is a “Type” category, and also an “Artists” facet, a “Price” facet, and so on. So each item can be in more than one facet, making it absolutely non-hierarchical and nearly impossible to place on a ordered shelf, but more easily found using a non-physical (computer-based) classification system (because it’s put in more places on the computer, essentially.) You see this type of classification at eBay, on Amazon, and other websites that want to give you the most hits for your search (Buy this! Buy it all!)

This wouldn’t really work for my library. An item cannot be in more than one place in a public library, unless you have more than one of the same item, and in that case you’d end up looking everywhere for one thing. So Dewey is still better, here. All hail Dewey!

Particularly when you're looking for a narrow subject in a collection of thousands. Whew.

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Photo: Dewey or don't we? by scampion on flickr