Discord over Dewey

In Discord over Dewey, an article in the Wall Street Journal online for July 20, 2007, Andrew Lavalee describes a branch library in Arizona which has dispensed with the Dewey Decimal classification and labeled the book spines with English words, such as “history” or “weddings.” There is still an online catalog, but no call numbers. The library looks and is arranged much like a chain bookstore, and apparently has been popular.

This piece of news leads me to opine that one size doesn’t necessarily fit all libraries. Perhaps all collections don’t automatically and with no consideration for their users NEED a classification system. Do small libraries with small collections designed primarily for leisure reading need to be arranged by call number, just as the collections in large research libraries are?

Even in large libraries, there may be individual collections which have not been classified because of size or type of materials. That fact alone refutes the argument that classification is always necessary as a finding tool.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink our desire to standardize, and consider fitting the arrangement of our collections to the kinds of users that our libraries attract.

By
Michele Seikel
Cataloger, Assoc. Prof. of Bibliography

Local catalogs dying?

Roy Tennant’s article in the July 2007 issue of Library Journal is entitled “Demise of the Local Catalog”. In it, he argues that the integrated library system (ILS) should “…be relegated to the backroom where it has always belonged.”

After devoting a brief section to what vendors are currently working on vis a vis metasearching and unified searching (that is, searching for information in multiple sources), Tennant then argues that the catalog will disappear and some “centralized finding tool” will take its place. His final section discusses briefly the new WorldCat Local, which is essentially WorldCat with search results ranked by location and relevance, with local holdings on top, regional holdings next, and then worldwide holdings.

Tennant does disclose his employment with OCLC, which is important since OCLC developed WorldCat Local and has a lot riding on its success. I understand that Tennant is coming at this question from the point of view of a digital librarian, and new thinking is important in our profession, but I believe that Tennant is a bit dismissive of the local catalog and the fact that most public libraries still catalog mostly print books, compact discs, and movies, not online resources and websites, and so for a lot of public libraries especially, the local catalog is the “centralized finding tool.”

What do you all think? Any other perspectives?

Submitted by Aaron K.