The Dewey Duodecimal System
by Fred Lerner
In
the early 1870s a young librarian at Amherst College devised a new way
of arranging the books in his charge. Instead of assigning each book to
a fixed location on the shelves, the place for each book would be
established in relation to the other books in the collection. That way,
when expansion or relocation of the library required the books to be
moved, it would not be necessary to change the labels on the books and
the entries in the catalog to reflect their new locations.
Perhaps it was Melvil Dewey’s enthusiasm for simplified spelling that
made him wary of relying upon an alphabetic arrangement by author or
subject; or perhaps the inefficiencies of alphabetical arrangement
helped to kindle that enthusiasm. Another Dewey enthusiasm, for the
adoption of the metric system of measurement, suggests a strong
appreciation of numerical systems employing the power of tens. Melvil
Dewey was a rationalist living and working in a rational age. He came
of age in a time and place where access to learning was increasingly
seen as every person’s right, and provision of that access one of
society’s most important duties.
So when he rearranged the books in the Amherst College Library he had
more on his mind than simply making it easier for students and faculty
to find the books they wanted. He meant to provide America’s libraries
with a way to bring their patrons and their books together, by making
it easier to use the library’s printed catalog to select books to
request for delivery from the stacks. In the increasing number of
libraries offering direct access to the bookshelves, his plan would
help readers find the books for themselves.
His Decimal Classification employed the same idea that underlay the
metric system: a structure of relationships governed by tens. The
subject-matter of all recorded knowledge and imagination would be
represented by ten broad categories, each of which would be subdivided
into ten subcategories, and so on down the line. His original scheme
embraced one thousand subjects, each represented by its own number; and
by the use of decimal fractions each of these could be subdivided ad
infinitum.
Dewey’s ten broad classes were:
000 General Works
100 Philosophy and Psychology
200 Religion
300 Social Sciences
400 Languages
500 Science and Mathematics
600 Technology and Applied Science
700 Arts and Recreation
800 Literature
900 History, Geography, Biography
The Dewey Decimal Classification has its faults. It was devised by an
American Protestant steeped in the western literary, philosophical, and
religious tradition, and this is reflected in the disproportionate
provision in the Religion class for Christianity (which receives fifty
numbers, as opposed to Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, which
receive only one apiece) and in the Literature class for American and
western European literature. There is also the problem that knowledge
is not always readily divisible into tenths; and even when it seems to
be, future discoveries and developments might call existing categories
into question. (The extensive literature of computer science was not
anticipated by any of the widely used library classification schemes.)
For those of us who were introduced to the Dewey Decimal Classification
by our school librarians, its division of all literature into ten
classes seems perfectly natural. While there might be a topic whose
placement in the scheme is not perfectly obvious, the question is
usually one of where to put it rather than a frustration at being
totally unable to find a place for it. (Perhaps the literature of
computer science should be placed in the 500s, as a pure science
comparable to mathematics; or in the 600s, as a species of engineering;
or even in the 000s, somewhere in the neighborhood of library science.
We can argue over which of these is the best place, but we can’t argue
that the DDC provides no possible place for it.)
*
A decimal classification, like a decimal system of numeration, is a
natural invention in a society of the ten-fingered. Plenty of people
have debated the advantages of numerations based on other integers: for
centuries it has been understood that base twelve better accommodates
division into smaller quantities, and during our lifetimes base two has
become the foundation for computing and communication. Lately I’ve got
to wondering what sort of libraries we might have if Melvil Dewey had
had twelve fingers. What might a Dewey Duodecimal system look like?
Leave aside the fact that it would offer nearly twice as many classes
as the Decimal Classification — and that’s without employing the
decimal point. The distinction between 1728 and 1000, though
numerically greater, is fundamentally insignificant when compared to
that between ten and twelve. How easy would it be to identify two
additional classes to add to Dewey’s original ten?
Let’s consider the DDC’s competitors. The Universal Decimal
Classification is based on Dewey’s, and as it name implies shares its
reliance on tens. Ranganathan’s Colon Classification, while ostensibly
rejecting the basic premises of an enumerative system, employs in its
schedules a group of categories that make little sense to me. It has 42
main classes, including “Journalism”, “Pharmacognosy”, and “Spiritual
Experience and Mysticism”. It makes a distinction between “Mathematical
Sciences” and “Mathematics”, but (so far as I can tell) nowhere
explains what distinguishes them. And it constructs its class numbers
by combining Roman letters (both upper- and lower-case), Greek letters,
punctuation marks, and Indo-Arabic numerals in a complex scheme based
on manifestations of five Fundamental Categories; Time, Space, Energy,
Matter, and Personality.
(The more I learn about it, the more alien the Colon Classification
seems to me. I can’t think of any other document that I’ve ever seen
that hints more broadly of extraterrestrial influence.)
The Library of Congress Classification was devised to serve the needs
of a single, very large, idiosyncratic institution. Its structure
derives, not from any theoretical approach to the classification of
knowledge, but from the extent and composition of its namesake’s
collection. While many other libraries have chosen to adopt it, and in
some cases to expand and extend it, the development of the LC
classification has generally been confined to serving the needs of its
parent library. Thus its list of major classes does not reflect Dewey’s
aspirations to universalism:
A General Works
B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion
C-F History
G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation
H Social Sciences
J Political Science
K Law
L Education
M Music And Books On Music
N Fine Arts
P Language And Literature
Q Science
R Medicine
S Agriculture
T Technology
U Military Science
V Naval Science
Z Bibliography and Library Science.
So where would a Dewey Duodecimal Classification find two new major
classes? I’ve got no particular quarrel with the ten that we inherited
from Melvil Dewey, so I don’t want to replace any of them. (I suppose
that in a pinch we could make do without the 400s, and amalgamate
Language with Literature as the Library of Congress does. But while the
Library of Sauron might want to classify its books into nine
categories, we’re under no such constraint!)
I suppose I’m displaying bias toward my own Mystery when I propose to
remove Information Science from the 000s and give it a broad class of
its own. I’d include communication and librarianship and a host of
related topics — after all, we’d have 144 numbers (in our base-ten
notation) to work with.
And I’ll atone for my favoritism by suggesting for the other new class
an area of learning that I have little use for: the Spiritual Experience
and Mysticism that Ranganathan places on an equal footing with the real
sciences of Physics and Geology. By isolating this nonsense in its own
class we can avoid contaminating legitimate realms of knowledge —
though perhaps there is some justice in leaving it with Psychology as
most Western classifications do.
I suppose that to librarians with too much time on their hands the
design of a classification scheme based on division into twelves is the
bibliographic equivalent of Fantasy Baseball or Rotisserie Football.
But I have suggested (in a story called “Rosetta Stone”) that we might
someday discover an alien race of which we know almost nothing, save
how it arranges its libraries. Perhaps by thinking about such matters
we might better prepare ourselves for such an encounter — especially if
those book-loving aliens turn out to have twelve fingers.
*
This essay originally appeared in Lofgeornost #93, November 2008. |