The Decimal Divide
This has been preying on my mind for some weeks now, and I feel it’s finally time to get it off my chest: I hate the Dewey Decimal System.
Wait, let me be more precise. I think the Dewey Decimal System works just fine for cataloging materials in a library. From a librarian’s point of view, I have nothing against the Dewey Decimal System.
But a few weeks ago, I was staffing our reference desk when a patron came up and asked for books on a particular subject. She knew they were nonfiction, but she wasn’t sure where in our nonfiction section the books would be. I looked up the subject in our catalog, found some titles that might suit her, and led her back to nonfiction, telling her what Dewey number the books would be found under.
And I suddenly felt like a dick.
The patron wasn’t stupid by any stretch. But here we were, expecting her to learn our Very Clever Indeed system of cataloging materials, just so she could find the books she was looking for. Frankly, I think that makes us a bunch of dicks.
Libraries are not bookstores. In general, I’m not in favor of the bookstorization of libraries. But would it kill us to put books in sections that non-librarians understand, like “Travel” and “Science” and “Self Help”? Most public libraries I’ve been in (including MPOW) put the biographies and autobiographies in their own section (in alphabetical order of the subject, not in Dewey order). I haven’t seen a public library yet that didn’t put works of fiction in separate sections (in alphabetical order of the author, not in Dewey order). So why is the majority of our nonfiction set up in such a way as to push patrons to ask us for help in finding materials? How does having books in Dewey Decimal order help patrons find library materials all by themselves?
I don’t mind helping people find the materials they’re looking for. In fact, I rather enjoy it. But I’m tired of library users feeling like they have to ask me for help because they haven’t gotten their Dewey Decimal System decoder ring yet. I’m tired of having to instruct people in how to locate books in our small branch library, even if it makes me look like a Very Smart Person. I’m tired of feeling like a dick.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Dewey is hard, dammit! And it does dickify us.
I don’t think that your problem is really to do with Dewey per se.
I don’t know the context of your library, but let’s assume that you work in a one or two floor public library. If you start getting into three floors, or god forbid an academic research library, some classification system is necessary.
So, given Dewey, most likely your shelves are already arranged by “‘Travel’ and ‘Science’ and ‘Self Help’”. The problem is not Dewey but the fact that, unlike the bookstore, instead of subjects you have the ends of the shelves labeled with “910″ “500″ and “158.1-158.2″. The classification system, which is just a way to keep related books together, is not the problem but the fact that it is not the policy of your library to have “SCIENCE” in big letters above the shelf.
Furthermore, arranging books by general topic then by author or some other alphabetical relationship a la Big Box Bookstore is totally inefficient once the patron actually finds the Science section. Given just an arrangement, two books on physics by Adams and Zachary would be on opposite ends of the shelf. Classified arrangement also includes the benefit of having slight gradations in subject being collated together as well.
Non-classified arrangement only really works in a closed-stack system. Certainly having to occasionally point out the science section is a small price to pay in opposition to having specific topics scattered throughout the shelves, as they would be in a purely alphabetical arrangement, and wasting extreme amount of the user’s time and effort. And you can always put signs up.
You’re right, Steven, signage is part of the problem. Having sections labeled by their subject rather than DDC number would be a huge step in the right direction. But you’re wrong about arranging materials like a bookstore. It’s not totally inefficient, and I know this because I used to work in bookstores. Even in stores that were much larger than my current place of employment, customers were usually able to find what they were looking for without assistance from the staff. When help was needed, it was usually to find out what section a particular item was in; once the customer knew what section to look in, they generally didn’t have a problem finding what they were looking for. Of course, bookstores are also set up to facilitate and encourage browsing. Most libraries I’ve been in aren’t.
The inefficiency of bookstores isn’t on the user end, it’s on the staff end. Because you don’t need an MLS, or more than one weeks training (of which searching the store databases is only a small part), to work at a bookstore, the cataloging used at bookstores is very basic and, in my experience, much less efficient or versatile than DDC or Library of Congress. I think that if you combined librarian cataloging on the staff end with bookstore arrangement and signage on the user end, public libraries would be vastly more user-friendly.
Interesting post. I don’t think that DDC is so bad, though I agree that libraries shouldn’t be hard to use. The point of classification of any sort is to make books (or other items) easy to browse. Remember that Dewey (for all his craziness) was trying to make libraries easy to use. There’s no reason we can’t continue that tradition. One thing that customers will never understand (and that many librarians don’t get) is that DDC is not meant to be a subject arrangement. Instead, it’s an “aspect of knowledge” arrangement. That’s why chicken genetics, chicken feathers in hats, chicken breeding, and chicken frying are not grouped together. Sure, some of these wouldn’t be together in a bookstore, but others would.
Most academic libraries that use DDC (and there are still a few) do classify biographies, autobiographies, and fiction. Why? Because in a reasearch setting it makes more sense.
Now, to get back to a small branch library, classifying thoese books doesn’t make sense. And we usually don’t classify magazines, DVDs or CDs (though we could). Ranganathan instructed us to “save the time of the reader”. When classification does this, it’s a great thing. When it doesn’t, we should do something different.
For example, a friend of mine is a manager in a branch library that’s in a botanical garden. She has a section “What You Learned in the Garden” with photography books of plants, botany, garden design, plant genetics, garden pests, vegetable gardening, cooking from the garden, crafts made from plants, and so on. Of course, this makes perfect sense in her library, as the customers want these things–yet they are classified all over the place. DDC should be a beginning, not the end.
I like the signage idea as well. I do think, though, if we didn’t shelve by dewey, we (as in staff) would never be able to find the book we are looking for – even in my smallish library.
For me, dewey is all about staff being able to find the exact spot on the shelf that the book is supposed to be in. This is very helpful if the patron knows exactly what book they are looking for. If they are just browsing, I’ve found that if I take them to the right section(s), they are usually able to find something that suits their needs. But again, I think if we had subject signage, the patrons would be more able to BROWSE by themselves. So, I don’t mind dewey.
What I personally find annoying is that in the YA FICTION section (especially), where books are alphabetical by author’s last name, that we then order by title and not number, in the case of series. So many YA titles are series now, that I wish series titles were then arranged numerically – so that when Johnny want the 7th in the damn Naruto series, I don’t have to guess which one that is (and he could also find it easier himself).
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