(no subject)

[melannen]

1. Have I mentioned I'm planning to March for Science tomorrow? The weather will be good. Hopefully I will not get trampled or arrested. Yay science!

2. I am stuck in the slog of the 300s in my nonfiction reshelving project. I hate the 300s SO MUCH. The 200s are also awful, but in an obvious and easily fixable way. The 300s are just a MESS.

Like, 302.2 "communication" contains a book on noise and a book on the Comics Code. 301.4 "Family structures" contains a book on the history prostitution, a book on social class in 19th century Russia, and an anthology on nomadism. I have many actual books about family structures! But no, Matrilineal Kinship is over in the 390s. Love's Promises is in the 340s. The Bonds of Womanhood is in the 305s somewhere. But we must put the one on the history of prostitution and the one on Russian peasants under "family structures".

The 310s-350s are reasonably straightforward, although why "Statistics" is under social sciences I am not sure, but then we hit 36x "Social Problems, Social Services" and oh god. 362, "Social Work", gives us AIDs and a book on Deaf culture (my other book on Deaf culture is in 305.9 "Groups of People, Miscellaneous". Why the split? No idea except that Dewey doesn't believe Deaf is a culture and bluescreened on books about Deaf culture.) Books about nuclear bombs are all under 363.1 "Health and Safety". A book of stories about psychic detectives are under 363.2 Law Enforcement, not even True Crime. Meanwile under 363.4 Drugs, Abortion, Pornography (??) we have a book about the reactions to political cartoons of the prophet Mohammed (????) 369, "social services - other" contains everything relating to scouting, even though my scouting-related books are all old guidebooks about nature topics that barely mention the scouts.

I'm scared to look too closely at the 390s.

3. I am trying to catch up on the reading! But I just had Makt Myrkanna come in from the library plus the new Ashers and Ysidro book *and* the Becky Chambers books so this is tough.

Comments

[muccamukk]

Books about nuclear bombs are all under 363.1 "Health and Safety"

That made me laugh.

[melannen]

I am tempted to keep that one just because it's pretty great.

[jadelennox]

Do you have an objection to 398.2?

(398.2 is a bucket o'crap, which is one of the many exhibits DDC provides for organizing being inherently biased. But I did live in the 398.2 shelf as a child.)

[melannen]

I have many objections to 398.2! One of them is the cultural bias one. One of them is that I lived through the AO3's attempt to remove all cultural bias from their 398.2 related tags, and still have flashbacks sometimes.

One of them is that my childhood library system insists on shelving the J 398.2 picture books in their own separate corner, which means people looking for picture books don't see them browsing and people looking in 398.2 think we only have ones for adults. (Also a bunch of fairy tale picture books *are* in with the picture books instead, apparently at random. And the J 398.2x are in with the nonfiction, so anthologies organized by culture or subject are there. So someone browsing wouldn't even realize some were pulled out.)

(I mean, it might make sense if we had enough for a whole big section that we labeled FAIRY TALES and put a comfy chair in, but we don't, it's like ten feet of shelf, and we aren't even allowed to label them FAIRY TALES because of the cultural bias thing, we have to label them 398.2. I didn't live in that shelf as a child because I don't think my family ever managed to stumble over it, I was stuck with grown-up fairylore like The Encyclopedia of Fairies and then D'Aulaires from J 398.209 and the cryptozoology in 398.24 ....actually that might explain a lot about me.)

[the_rck]

I still get cranky that the Magic School Bus books all get shelved in non-fiction. That means that parents have to know they exist in order to find them and have to locate each title in a separate place. Those start appealing to kids at about three years old, but very few parents browse the non-fiction section at our local library to find things to read to their kids. The ones in my daughter's elementary school library pretty much never circulated in spite of the kids being really thrilled to read them when they got them in the classroom.

[ratcreature]

I am really clueless about library organizations, but how is it even fixed in which category you have to put a book if you use that classification? Assign publishers their books to a group? I mean, I've sometimes noticed that English non-fiction books have keywords put on the imprint page, but those don't seem to be what you mean here?

[melannen]

So, if I was a real librarian, I would have taken classes and known the actual reasons these books are where they are. A lot of them do have logic you can find, if you squint very hard and imagine you are in a 19th century American university library. :P

But for the project, I'm using Librarything's MDS tables, which let you sort your library by Dewey number and also show you the subject headings they fall under (here's what it looks like). It's not perfect because they're trying to sneak through without paying out the nose for copyright permission by cobbling it together from public domain stuff, but it's very helpful. LT also fills in its best guess for the call numbers for my books. If I'm side-eyeing LT's automated guess, I can double-check with OCLC Classify, which lets me look up a title and see what basically every library that uses Dewey has classified it under; sometimes the OCLC libraries wildly disagree but the examples I listed in this post are ones where everyone on OCLC unanimously agrees. If it still doesn't make sense I check 025.421 The Dewey Blog to see if they have ever posted about why they do things so badly, thus my discovery and deep hatred of the Rule of Application.

There's nothing stopping me from deciding everyone else in the world is wrong and putting my own number into LT, which I have done a couple of times when it is just SUPER WRONG, but if I did that with 30x and 36x there wouldn't be much left in them. And the main reason I'm doing this is to learn more about Dewey, which we use at my work.

If I want to try to fix Dewey I might as well just make my own system from the ground up (which some libraries are doing, and I am working on mine as I work through the reshelve; after I do the nonfiction I have a 300-ish-item collection of booklets/magazines/other ephemera that mostly don't even have best guess call numbers on LT, so I think I am going to test my custom system on them.)

[ratcreature]

Ah. When I look at the books I have put into librarything and sort it with the Dewey option it some of the choices seem really odd. Like they put physics text in the same group as a biography of a physicist even though there exist a further subgroup for physics biographies. Even more puzzling is that they sorted the German translation of Flatland, which obviously is fiction, into physics as well.

[the_rck]

Publishers do provide some cataloging information with their books. It's been about 25 years since I took cataloguing, though. At that point, non-fiction books had something called 'cataloguing in publication' (or CIP) data on the verso of the title page that included suggested subject headings and a suggested Dewey call number. A lot of very small libraries relied heavily on that because they couldn't afford to catalog things themselves or to subscribe to a service that would do it.

The cataloguing class I took emphasized that 'real' cataloguers would never, ever use CIP data because it's not fully reliable, but the instructor admitted that it really only mattered for very large libraries and for research/specialty libraries.

Looking at a non-fiction book I've got from our local library, the verso of the title page says that CIP data is available from the Library of Congress, so I assume there must be some sort of readily accessible database for that. (I haven't worked in a library for seventeen years, and then, it was a large research library).

[melannen]

Yeah, the first time I shelved by subject was back before I had wifi and I used the LoC numbers in the CIP data for the books that had it. A lot of older books and books through non-mainstream publishers don't have it, though.

There's a lot of cataloging info available through the Library of Congress website (although for the last twenty years or so, they only catalog a fairly limited subset of stuff - they don't do every book published in the US by a long shot, and they're really bad at not-from-US.) The OCLC Worldcat, which is catalog-of-catalogs and publically searchable, has a lot more, though even it's not very good for stuff from publishers outside the US and Western Europe - I have local folklore books from Mongolia, Serbia, and Honduras that I couldn't even find on Worldcat at all, nor any of my Icelandic books. And you can't see the current Dewey Decimal tables without paying extortion money to the copyright holders, so for stuff not in Worldcat I'm left guessing based on what's in the public domain and how similar books are cataloged.

[twistedchick]

Re statistics -- used in every social science degree program that I know of, though pure stats should be under Mathemetics somewhere else. Re reactions to political cartoons of Mohammed, check the murder of French cartoonists by Wahabbist Islamites a few years ago because the Islamists objected to the portrayal of Mohammed in a cartoon. It's a thing, really.

[melannen]

Yeah, that's mostly what the book is about, I'm just not sure how that has anything to do with "drugs, pornography, abortion"?

Stats are used in every science degree program I know of, period. There is a "Statistical Mathematics" category nested really deep under Applied Math as 519.2, and looking more closely at OCLC, it looks like people are starting to move most general stats books there from the top-level class in Social Sciences 320, but they're still kind of split.

There are four stats books in my LT catalog; one of them is "Statistics for Geographers", which is under the 900s with Geography, one is on statistical fallacies and the placebo effect in the medical literature which is under Medicine, and one of them is Stats for Engineers which is under 519.2 Math Stats and not under Engineering, because f$%@$ the Rule of Application. "How to Lie With Statistics" is in the 320s; I can kind of see how that belongs in social sciences maybe, since it's mostly about science communication, although I wouldn't put it under stats if I was focusing on the "How to Lie" part.

It looks like the newer editions of How To Lie With Statistics are actually mostly in the 500s in OCLC but I have the original one and that one is overwhelmingly under 310s, so it seems to be more a trend over time with younger catalogers going "wtf why is the top-level stats category in Social Sciences?" and putting things under math, rather than being content-based.

[twistedchick]

Drugs, pornography and abortion are the subjects of some of the most common statistical studies these days -- all three are political, can be bent by wonks using stats as weapons, and came up during the last election.

[king_touchy]

Have I mentioned I'm planning to March for Science tomorrow?

Me, too! I'm bringing a car-load.

[melannen]

Woot! I was going to try going without a group this time, unless I can talk my mom into it by reminding her that they are trying to take her PBS away. The though of not having to keep track of other people in the crowd for once was really tempting...

[siegeofangels]

I always like browsing in the 300s because it is such a trove of different things. But I see your frustration. I was trying to classify a museum object the other day where our classification system goes by use, and only this one culture has this particular artifact, and I could not find an analogue anywhere. :/ in the end I just had to pick something and move on but it still niggles at me.

[melannen]

At the public library where I work the 300s are the most depressing of all sections. First there's shelf after shelf of books with titles like "How to get your life in order ", "How to make your man treat you like a person by acting like a nonperson," and "How fix your terrible financial situation," invariably checked out by people who return them over a week late looking frazzled. Then there are the shelves of political polemics which I avoid at all costs. Also: job-hunting, school admissions and test-prep books in a variety of fields, most of them dated and in terrible shape and checked out by people to whom I just want to say "oh honey I'm sorry." Finally, a massive section of "How To Homeschool Your Kids" books, mostly designed for the kind of parents who hate and fear learning things.

There is some cool stuff tucked in between them here and there but it's not worth it and I avoid that aisle whenever possible and pretend it starts with the 380s. :P

(At a library that was not a suburban public library the proportion of interesting books I am sure would go way up - it will be in my home library! - but because it's the grab-bag section in a lot of ways, it gets all the books that someone like Dewey would never dream of owning but that are really essential in a public library.)

[the_rck]

I have Opinions about cataloguing, but mostly they have to do with consistency throughout the collection and with putting things where they can be found by the people who might be interested.

Things like, if the Silmarillion is shelved as fiction, then books consisting of several excerpted chapters of the Silmarillion should not be in non-fiction in the 800s. Everything in one place or the other.

I'm still cranky that my high school library shelved Robin McKinley's Beauty in non-fiction (somewhere in the 800s, I believe). I found it entirely by accident while looking for something else, and I don't think anyone else ever checked it out in the four years I was there.

[melannen]

Yeah, I can see why people are totally into the idea of an internally consistent system with strict rules where every book is cataloged the same in every library, but especially now that we have computer catalogs and can use really flexible search systems, they really should emphasize Where Will Our Patrons Look For This above all.

*Technically* all fiction belongs in the 800s, but it makes total sense that libraries pull most of it out. But then why don't they pull out all of it?? (Such angst over whether to let "Cursed Child" shelve with the rest of Harry Potter instead of under nonfiction with Plays.)

[the_rck]

I'm not so much concerned about uniformity from library to library. I just want a given library to have rules and stick to them. It's the sort of thing where it actually doesn't matter what the rules are as long as they're consistent within a given system.

So my complaint about Beauty is not that it was in the 800s in my high school library but that it was the only novel I found there.

The library I used to work at, the University of Michigan Graduate Library, frustrated me because they used LC for almost everything but then used Dewey for literature. Mostly, except when they didn't.

I tend to think that cataloguing priorities differ vastly depending on the type of library. If patrons are going to find things entirely by browsing (which many people, particularly kids, do in public libraries), that calls for different strategies/techniques than if patrons are all doing focused research. What works in one place will likely be terrible for the other.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

My big frustration is that the crafting books are higgled by some unknown force, so the crochet randomly occurs amongst the knitting and quilting. And then there are the patches of Craft By Holiday.

[melannen]

They shouldn't be? Knitting and crochet and quilting all have their own subcats. They are pretty well separated in my library. (Except, yes, the Craft by Holiday stuff and so on, because #$%WT#$$ the Rule of Application.) I think you might be suffering from a library that doesn't always categorize all the way down into the subcats and doesn't think the difference matters.

(...of course it can't seem to decide at what point fiber crafts are Silly Pastimes rather than Economically Valuable Occupations, so my spinning books are apparently split between the 600s Technology and Manufacturing and the 700s Arts and Recreation. Macrame is Recreation, Knot-Tying is Technology.)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I think it's because the crafting books often have Themes that outrank the craft, so crocheted afghans are in with quilts, and garment knitting and garment crochet are together. It's harder with some of the collections than others; the one closest to my house is a very short run of books in the Crafting, while another branch I use has Lots of Crafting. Of course, there is crafting that's not in crafting because it is Pop/Millennial Crafting. Something like that.

[jesse_the_k]

I learned a lot from this post, please complain about cataloging anytime you'd like. You also prompted me to track down the "rule of application," and WOW! that analysis brings to mind Biblical exegesis.

Also, when I was starting out in disability studies (1970s) it was bizarrely difficult to find things to read. Electronic searching has made it easier.

[melannen]

I did not expect fifty comments' worth of interest in library classification! I will have to keep it in mind.

Dewey does not seem to understand "disability" being a concept so the books are shoehorned in all over. :/