I got up far too early, pulled the Times from the sidewalk, and opened the Styles section to its “Weddings/Celebrations” section to count the gay marriages. Imagine my delight to see an announcement of the civil union for Larissa Cheney Brookes, SJSU LIS student, and her EPA-lawyer partner, Elizabeth La Blanc. You go gals!
Then I whaled away at my talk for Tuesday at Defrag. I used CommentPress to rough out a slidespace for this presentation; I have it in PowerPoint as well, but am hoping I can just run this live from the site. There’s not much online at this point, but the stuff between my ears feels much clearer.
After circling and circling the issue, I think I’ve hit my key points, which are that taxonomies and folksonomies are not in opposition but can peacefully coexist along the ontological spectrum, and that (as Don Yarman also suggested in a comment yesterday) uber-folksonomies are an important and overlooked third path. Among uber-folksonomies I include Librarything for Libraries, the evolving taxonomy in Wikipedia (which any novice soon learns is expert-controlled), and Librarians’ Internet Index.
I’m toying with whether the Onix-based organization of the Perry Branch of Maricopa County Library and the Onix facets in Phoenix Public Library’s OPAC can be included as uber-folksonomies, or if I just want to talk about this to show non-librarians these two interesting examples of librarians playing in the taxonomic space.
I know it enrages some librarians every time I say this, but based on how much David Weinberger discusses Dewey in Everything is Miscellaneous, I feel it necessary to debunk the idea that Dewey is primarily used as a “classification” system. It’s primitive at best in that mode: we only assign one number per item; that number is used primarily for inventory (shelf location) purposes; the fact that Dewey uses numbers to begin with — which requires learning the number-concept assignment and then mentally translating one to the other — makes it very weak as a classification system. Plus books are assigned both Dewey and LCSH.
In many ways, Dewey has all the disadvantages of alphabetical organization (arbitrary, single-point-of-filing) without the simple advantage that — arbitrary as it is — most native speakers learn alphabetical order early in life and can grasp alphabetical ranges in a way they cannot grasp Dewey without more education in what is ultimately a special-use language.
LCSH, MeSH, and Onix are much more interesting spaces to discuss in terms of the strengths and limitations of taxonomies, in part because they are actually used as functioning taxonomies, online as well as off.
Two hours til the cab comes. Shower! Dress! Hit the packing list one more time! On to Denver!
Posted on this day, other years:
- Free Range Beer, Powerpoint, Writing, and Suitcases - 2008
- The User is not only not Broken... - 2006
- The Prodigal SWAG! - 2005
- A Conference Booth, from the Other Side - 2005
- Michael Stephens' Blog Survey, and Away to CLA - 2005
- Say Yes to RSS - 2004
- This Uppity Lesbian Is Telling You to Blame Someone Else - 2004
How can folskonomies effectively deal with hierarchy? That is one feature that Dewey and its numerical structure reflects well. Granted, it’s an imperfect mechanism for reflecting hierarchy. Nonetheless, I’d be curious to hear about alternative mechanisms for describing the hierarchical nature of some knowledge.
Look at lii.org ; there’s no reason folksonomies can’t be faceted. In fact a very good role for librarians in the new era is to see opportunities for faceting data and apply it.
I would say that Dewey enables faceting, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to GOOD faceting.
This piqued my curiosity. You’re planning on using CommentPress as a presentation tool? How does that work, exactly? (I’m always looking for nifty new presentation style ideas…)
I was going to use a post-per-general-talkspace, with one image and nice links. Fiddle dee dee! The good news: most people here are using PowerPoint.
>I feel it necessary to debunk the idea that Dewey >is primarily used as a “classification†system. It’s >primitive at best in that mode: we only assign >one number per item. that number is used >primarily for inventory (shelf location) purposes
We should make a distinction between practice and principle. In practice librarians in the US tend to assign one DDC number to an item because they tend to equate DDC classification numbers with inventory control, but in principle those librarians could just as easily assign as many DDC numbers as they want to reflect an item’s subject content.
In fact, it’s what Dewey originally intended because the DDC was to serve as the basis for his classified catalog.
From Gordon Stevenson’s “The classified catalog
of the New York State Library in 1911” one reads:
The use of the Decimal Classification (DDC) to
organize books on shelves was an afterthought, a byproduct of a system originally conceived as a method of subject cataloging In the Preface of the first edition of the DDC, Dewey wrote:
The system was devised for cataloguing
and indexing purposes, but it was
found on trial to be equally valuable for
numbering and arranging books
and pamphlets on the shelves.
Using the DDC for inventory control was an afterthought. I’d be happy to send you a copy of the paper.
And I have to disagree that the DDC is primitive. In current practice, as a shelving device, it might look primitive, but check out what OCLC is
doing with the DDC in Dewey Browser (http://deweyresearch.oclc.org/ddcbrowser/wcat). OCLC is also working on automatically assigning multiple DDC numbers to bib records. This will allow searchers using Dewey Browser to come at something from a variety of perspectives. OCLC has also experimented with using but hiding the DDC notation and expressing the subject information using DDC Relative Index captions.
Bryan Campbell
Charlottesville, VA
classz696@yahoo.com
Bryan, almost one hundred years later, isn’t it time to agree that Dewey isn’t going to be used as a classification system — perhaps for very good reasons?