| Section
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Notes
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Misc
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| Hierarchical (aka Enumerative) Classification
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Hierarchical (aka Enumerative) Classification
- Lists all possible subjects as mutually exclusive classes
- Requires a "primary"/initial principle of organization which organizes in a top-down manner
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Hierarchical/Enumerative Classification
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Faceted Classification
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| Nature of organization
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Top down, requires a primary/initial principle of organization
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More distributed, able to make all facets, then decide what comes first in a hierarchical order
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| DDC vs LCC (Library of Congress Classification)
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DDC: Everything is one of 10 things (identified by numbers)
- 000-999
- Top 100 classes in the DDC system
LCC: Everything is one of 26 things (identified by letters)
- Each category is divided into about 10-20 subclasses, each of which is further subdivided
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Others:
BISAC (Book Industry Standards Advisory Committee Classification) is also another form of classification system "used by major businesses within the North American book industry" (TDOO, 8.3). Generally used by publishers to suggest to book sellers how a book should be classified in physical and digital bookstores.
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| 4 Basic Assumptions of Universal, Hierarchical Classification
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- Four Assumptions of Universal, Hierarchical Classification
- The world has a universal order
- There is a unity of all knowledge available
- Some sort of cohesive relationship
- Systematic, true way to describe relationships between and across classification classes
- There must be an essential similarity of class members
- Members of a category share essential properties
- Every entity has some intrinsic essence that allows it to be classified in a set way
- The world has an order, and all entities has intrinsic essence that maps to the order of the world which we can locate in our system
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| Standards for Classification
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- Five Main Standards for Classification
- Inclusive - a place for every concept
- Unique - each concept fits in only ONE class, no overlap between classes
- Expressive - the numbers/label should represent the concept
- Hospitable - there is room/space to add more classes
- Linear - produce numbers/labels that can be ordered in an intuitive and straightforward way
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| The Arrangement of Classes
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Hierarchical Classification allows us to interpret where any given item is in, in a successively broader set of parent classes
- As part of the domain
- Within the specific context of that domain's classificatory system
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| History of DDC
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- World's most widely used bibliographic system, applied to books is >200,000 libraries in 135 countries (The Discipline of Organizing, section 8.3)
- Encompasses a universe of knowledge
- It is a theory of organization that is
- Based on Francis Bacon
- Structure of knowledge based on 19th century WASP (White Anglo-Sexan Protestant) academia
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| Evaluation of the DDC
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+:
- Inclusivity -- room for any concept (at least in theory)
- Expressiveness -- the class numbers express meaning
- Constant Revision -- means for input and critique at both class level (individual topics) and hierarchical structure (proportion, order, and placement)
-:
- Bias -- based on Dewey's worldview and based on the historical proportions of publishing
- About 80 numbers covering Christianity, other religions only get 10 numbers in the end
- Inconsistencies -- within and between classes (due to revisions over time)
- E.g. heterogeneous principles of division in 640 Home Economics
- Some classes are ambiguous and do overlap as in 641.5 Cooking; thus there are tables in Dewey that shares how to navigate these references. Users may be confused and find it challenging to navigate.
- "not very hospitable to new areas of knowledge" (The Discipline of Organizing, section 8.3)
- For e.g., indigenous forms of knowledge (not necessarily 'new') that may not be easy classifiable in a system like DDC
Fixes of DDC
- Optional arrangement: keeps the numbers but instructs how to order by chronology and region
- Turned into a renumbering process that reflects proportion of numbers
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Think:
- what is privileged (at the top, take up more categories) vs what is sidelined (at the bottom/end, occupy fewer categories in proportion to its scale)
- Neighboring (proximity) items
https://ddc.typepad.com/025431/
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| Summary of Understanding a Classification System
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- What are the first principles of division that list out the main areas of human knowledge?
- What political and philosophical positions are implied?
- What set or scope of resources is it meant to organize?
- Is it specialist or universal?
- Which institutions use it for shelf-order and access?
- DDC: Public Libraries and LCC: Academic Libraries,
- What is the maintenance and revision status of the classification system?
- Who is primarily responsible?
- What are the means to propose changes in the system?
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