The language and form, whether it is a commentary on some other book, etc. And then there are a great number of additional “devices” that can be used to go further: books can be promoted to “classic” status and made into their own category anteriorizing and posteriorizing facets to describe the structure of the book. History, for instance, using additional time and space facets to discuss the subject of the book, freeing up the other two for the origin of the book itself. Then, each class or subclass can define its own facets. A further four facets can be used to narrow the book down by time, space, noun and verb (called “matter” and “energy” but I prefer my words). That statement can then be encoded into a terse syntax, and we’ll use that syntax as the class portion of the call number.Īll of the work done in other systems to produce the total classification is just part of the “personality” facet of the book under CC. Colon instead seems to be saying: let’s create a precise, formal statement about the subject of a book. So both spend most of their effort trying to figure out what the real subject of the book is, so they can produce a call number that puts things together helpfully. The primary problem as perceived by LoC and DDC is: where does this book go on the shelves? And that question raises design concerns: one wants books to be together with other books on the same topic rather than sorted by color or author’s favorite animal. And then there is the Colon Classification, which deserves a special, lengthy introduction. It is, unfortunately, almost totally unheard of here in America. Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) adds some syntatic horror and can be had in a real electronic format. Dewey (DDC) has that childish air to it, but can be delivered in a single abbreviated volume and produces short and tidy call numbers. The Library of Congress classification (LoC) has a pleasant hideous formality, but the tables are quite enormous and it has a tendency to scatter related things into different corners. There are four ways to classify books, and they each have strengths and weaknesses. The latter thing there implies sortabililty. There are three purposes for the call number: to make it possible to uniquely identify a book, to give your patrons a way to look for a book, and to give you a unique relative placement for the book on the shelves. The call number usually incorporates some auxilliary information about the book, like the author, title, or year of publication. You may be surprised to discover, as I was, that every library (potentially!) uses different call numbers to identify books. Perhaps you thought, as I did, that every book has a magic code on the inside flap with where it should be placed! Well, many do, but many do not, and aside from that, this just gets you the class of the book, not whatever additional information you might want to incorporate into the call number. It turns out one of their major problems is classifying the books. ![]() I assumed they had things to do other than “ssh!”ing people but I never really probed further than that. ![]() What do librarians do? I never really asked myself this question. This is the only way to convert your freeloading friends into legitimate library patrons. If we want to make the task harder, and thus, more fun, we have to go further than that. You just go install Delicious Monster or BookPedia or something. ![]() This has to stop, but solving this problem is boring and easy. I recently started keeping track of my books at all-a few too many of my expensive computer science tomes have walked away without my really knowing who has them. If you’re like me, you’re always in search of new ways to fetishize your books.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |