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).

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.

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.

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.